Saturday, May 15, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
reddit: Noam Chomsky
NOAM CHOMSKY: The first question here is from cocoon56:
Do you currently see an elephant room of cognitive science, just like you named one 50 years ago—I guess that's a reference to my critique of radical behaviorism—something that needs addressing that gets too little attention?
Well, one thing that I think gets too little attention in the room of cognitive science is cognitive science. Most of the work that's done just doesn't seem to me to bear on cognitive science. I could pick up a couple of journals here and give examples.
Cognitive science ought to be concerned—should be just a part of biology. It's concerned with the nature, the growth, the development, maybe ultimately the evolution, of a particular subsystem of the organism, namely the cognitive system, which should be treated like the immune system or the digestive system, the visual system, and so on. When we study those systems, there are a number of questions we ask.
One question is of course, you know, what they are: can we characterize them? But that's almost totally missing in cognitive science. I mean, take my own particular area of interest, language. A ton of work in what's called "cognitive science" on what they call "language", but it's very rare to see some effort to characterize what it is. Well, if you can't do that, it doesn't make much difference what else you do.
The second kind of question you have to ask about any organ, if you like (some use the term loosely), subsystem of the body, is how it gets the way it is. So how does it go from some initial state, which is genetically determined, to whatever state it assumes? And in investigating that topic, there are a number of different factors that you can take apart for analytic purposes. And one is the specific genetic constitution that's related specifically to this system. It doesn't mean that every piece of it is used only for this system, but just whatever combination of genetically determined properties happens to determine that you have a mammalian rather than an insect visual system, for example, or a gut-brain, or whatever it may be. That's one. The second is whatever data are outside that modify the initial state to yield some attained state. And the third is: how do laws of nature enter into the growth and development of the system? Which of course they do, overwhelmingly. I mean, nobody, for example, assumes that you have a particular genetic program to determine that cells split into spheres, not cubes, let's say—that's due to, you know, minimization of energy, other laws of nature. And the same holds throughout the course of development. Of course, the same is true for evolution. Evolution takes place with a specific physical, chemical channel of options and possibilities, and physical laws enter all the time into determining what goes on.
And the third question is that—it's kind of like a "why" question: why is the system this way and not some other way? Well, there again you go back into—at this point you really are facing, first of all, just historical accidents like, you know, an asteroid hit the Earth. But more significantly, how do the physical and chemical properties of the universe enter into determining that certain evolutionary changes take place under particular circumstances?
Well, that's the array of questions that ought to be asked. It is very hard to find any focus on these questions, at least in the areas of cognitive science that I'm particularly interested in, like language, for example. What you have is extreme efforts, which are sometimes extremely strange, to try to show that trivial problems for which we basically know the answers, and have for 60 years, can be somehow dealt with by massive data analysis. And so I could give examples, but—and, in fact, I've written about examples. But I think it's kind of off track.
I'd like to see cognitive science focus on the topics that it ought to be addressing. Now, this is a very broad brush, so a lot of it does, and there's very good work in cognitive science, but it's in my opinion much too restricted, and a lot of time and effort is spent—in my view largely wasted—on the peripheral issues which just don't make any sense which [when] you look at them, and efforts which just collapse, and constantly. In fact, many of them are a kind of a residue of the radical behaviorism that the field sought to overcome as it developed. I could give examples, but it's—a very general, broad-brush feeling—unfair to a lot of very good work. But we're trying to pick out tendencies which I think are off track and missing things.
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The second comes from TheSilentNumber:
What are some of your criticisms of today's anarchist movement? How to be as effective as possible is something many anarchists overlook, and you're perhaps the most prolific voice on this topic, so your thoughts would be very influential.
Well, don't agree with the last comment, but my criticisms of today's anarchist movement are a little bit like the critique of cognitive science. What is today's anarchist movement? I mean, there's quite a lot of people, in fact, you know, an impressive number of people, who think of themselves as being committed in some fashion to what they call "anarchism". But is there an anarchist movement? I mean, can one think of—you know, is there something like, say, during the day—.
Twenty years ago I happened to be in Madrid. That happened to be May Day. And there were huge demonstration—May Day demonstration, hundreds of thousands of people from the CMT, the old anarchist labor organization. Well, you can have all kinds of criticisms of the anarchist movements in Spain and so on, but at least there was something to point to, there was something there, there was something to criticize or to support or to try to change or whatever.
But today's anarchism in the United States, as far as I can see, is extremely scattered, highly sectarian, so each particular group is spending a great deal of his time attacking some other tendency—sometimes doing useful, important things, but it's extremely hard to—. I think what is—this is not just true of people who think of themselves as anarchists, but of the entire activist left. Count noses. There's plenty of people, I mean, more than there were at any time in the past that I can think of, except for maybe, you know, tiny, ["pyoosh"], very brief moment late '60s, or CIO organizing in the ' 30s, and things like that. But there are people interested in all sorts of things. You know, you walk down the main corridor at this university, you see, you know, desks of students, very active, very engaged, lots of great issues, but highly fragmented. There's very little coordination. There's a tremendous amount of sectarianism and intolerance, mutual intolerance, insistence on, you know, my particular choice as to what priorities ought to be, and so on.
So I think the main criticism of the anarchist movement is that it just ought to get its act together and accept divisions and controversies. You know, we don't have the answers to—we have, maybe, guidelines as to what kind of a society we'd like, not specific answers; nobody knows that much. And there's certainly plenty of range—of room for quite healthy and constructive disagreement on choice of tactics and priorities and options, but I just see too little of that being handled in a comradely, civilized fashion, with a sense of solidarity and common purpose.
As to how to be as effective as possible, yeah, that's exactly the point: what should we address? You don't have to give a list of severe problems that the world faces. Some of them are extremely severe. So, for example, there are really questions of species survival, literally, at least two, maybe more. One of them is the existence of nuclear weapons. Somebody watching from Mars would think it's a miracle that we've survived for the last 60 years, and it's extremely dangerous right now, so I can't see how that can fail to be a priority. And the other is a looming environmental crisis. And that is something that anarchists in particular should be very dedicated to addressing, because it involves—on the one hand, it does involve questions of technology, like, you know, can you get solar power to work and so on.
And the antiscience tendency in anarchism, which does exist, is completely self-defeating on this score. I mean, it is going to take, it is going to require sophisticated technology and scientific discoveries to create the possibility for human society to survive—I mean, unless we decide, well, it just shouldn't survive, we should get down to, you know, 100,000 hunter-gatherers or something. Okay, except for that, if you're serious about, you know, the billions of people in the world who—and their children and grandchildren, it's going to require scientific and technological advances.
But it's also going to require radical social change. I mean, there's been a—particularly in the United States, but it's true elsewhere, too, there have been, you know, massive state-corporate social engineering projects—very self-conscious; they don't hide what they are doing—since the Second World War to try to construct a social system that is based critically on wasteful exploitation of fossil fuels. You know, that's what it means to suburbanize, to build highways and destroy railroads, and so on through the whole gamut of planning that's been undertaken. Well, you know, that means very substantial social changes in order, and anarchists ought to be thinking about it.
You know, thinking about it doesn't just mean I'd like to have a free and just society; you know, that's not thinking about it. We have to make a distinction if we want to be effective. That's the question: if we want to be effective, we have to make a distinction between what you might call proposals and advocacy. I mean, you can propose that everybody ought to live in peace, love each other, we shouldn't have any hierarchy, everyone should cooperate, and so on. Okay? It's a nice proposal, okay for an academic seminar somewhere.
Advocacy requires more than just proposal. It means setting up your goals (proposal), but also sketching out a path from here to there (that's advocacy). And the path from here to there almost invariably requires small steps. It requires recognition of social and economic reality as it exists, and ideas about how to build the institutions of the future within the existing society, to quote Bakunin, but also to modify the existing society. That means steps have to be taken that accommodate reality, that don't deny it's existence ("Since I don't like it, I'm not going to accommodate it"). These are the only ways to be effective.
You know, you can see that if you look at, you know, the serious, substantial anarchist journals. Like, take, say, Freedom in England, which maybe is the oldest or one of the oldest anarchist journals, that's been around, you know, forever. If you read its pages, most of it is concerned with mild reformist tactics. And that's not a criticism. It should be. It should be concerned with workers rights, with specific environmental issues, with problems of poverty and suffering, with imperialism, and so on. Yeah, that's what it should be concerned with if you want to advocate long-term, significant social change towards a more free and just society, and I can't think of any other way to be effective. Otherwise, the insistence on purity of proposal simply isolates you from effectiveness in activism, and even from reaching, from even approaching your own goals; and it does lead to the kind of sectarianism and narrowness and lack of solidarity and common purpose that I think has always been a kind of pathology of marginal forces, the left in particular. But it is particularly dangerous here.
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Which gets to the next sentence, from BerserkRL. It's a long question, but I'll just summarize it:
As far as we favor a stateless society in the long run, it would be a mistake to work for the elimination—I've said that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of the state in the short run, and we should be trying to strengthen the state, 'cause it's needed on the check of power of large corporations. Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research—my own, too—is to show that the power of large corporations derives from state privilege, and governments tend to get captured by concentrated private interests. That would seem to imply that the likely beneficiaries of a more powerful state is going to be the same corporate elite we're trying to oppose. So if business both derives from the state and is so good at capturing the state, why isn't abolishing the state a better strategy for defeating business power than enhancing the state's power would be?
Well, there's a very simple answer to that: it's not a strategy, and since it's not a strategy at all, there can't be a better strategy. The strategy of "eliminating the state" is back on the level of "let's have peace and justice". How do you proceed to eliminate the state? Okay? Can you think of a way of doing it? I mean, if there were a way of doing it in the existing world, everything would collapse and be destroyed. You just can't do it. I mean, there is nothing to replace it. If there was a rich, powerful network of, you know, cooperatives, community organizations, worker-controlled industry, you know, extending over the whole country, and the whole world, in fact, yeah, then you can talk about eliminating states. But to talk about eliminating the state in the world as it exists is simply to keep yourself in some remote academic seminar or small group, you know, saying, "Gee, this would be nice." It's not a strategy, so there can't be a better strategy. We are faced with realities. What is described here, and in fact it's true (I've written plenty about it, too), is that we have a number of systems of power, closely interlinked. One of them's corporate power, business power. That's by far the most dangerous of all. That means, effectively, unaccountable private tyrannies. A second, pretty closely linked to them, is state power. And the comment is correct (as the commentator says, I've written about it, too, a lot) that state power tends to be overwhelmingly influenced by concentrated private power.
Okay, those are real problems. Now we face strategies. So, for example, say—take, say, health care, okay? Right on the front pages. What's the strategy for dealing with the fact that tens of millions of people can't get—the best health care they can get is to be dragged to an emergency room when it's too late to do anything? I mean, that's a real problem, and that's a huge part of the population. Second problem is that in a privatized, unregulated health-care system like the United States'—I shouldn't say "like," because it's the only one. In a privatized, unregulated health-care system where the drug companies are so powerful that the government isn't even allowed to negotiate drug prices, in that kind of system, first of all, health care is strictly rationed by wealth, very strictly, and secondly, it is designed in such a way that the federal budget is going to be destroyed. You just take a look at the tendency lines. There won't be anything left for schools, for Social Security, for worker safety, anything. What'll be left is for the military. That's untouchable. It keeps going up—another problem we've got to look at. Obama has the biggest military budget since the Second World War. But as long as that is over there, untouchable, another elephant in the closet, the radically inefficient privatized, unregulated health-care system, is extremely harmful for people, except for the wealthy—you know, they do fine—and is also going to destroy everyone else.
So what we do about it? Well, it's not a strategy to say, okay, let's abolish the state. That doesn't do anything about it, and in fact it's just a gift to the corporate state power sector 'cause it offers nothing. A short-term answer is to do what the large majority of the population has wanted for decades, namely, to develop a sensible national health-care system of the kind that every other industrial country has, one variety or another. Well, it happens to be a large majority opinion, so you don't have to break down many walls to organize people about it. It has been for decades. It's strongly opposed by the corporate-state nexus, but that's not unbreakable; you know, bigger victories have been won. We could go into details, you know, like what you do about the fact that the Democrats have sold out, for obvious reasons, on even minor palliatives like a public option and so on. What do you do about the fact, a very concrete fact—. There was just an election in Massachusetts which surprised everyone totally—almost completely misrepresented, but I won't go into that. But one of the striking things about the election was that the union members, Obama's natural constituency, most of them didn't bother voting 'cause there was tremendous apathy in the poor, working-class areas. (The election was won by the wealthy suburbs.) But of those who voted, most of them voted for Scott Brown, the Republican, against the Democrats—shooting themselves in the foot, incidentally, 'cause one of the first things that happened is to knock off one possibly pro-union member from the National Labor Relations Board. But they had reasons, and the reasons are very clear—just read the labor press. The reasons are that Obama made it very explicit that he was willing to compromise or give up on everything except one thing: taxing union members for their health-care plans. So, sure, people are enraged about that. I mean, why shouldn't they be? It's not an anarchist position; it's just a simple, elementary, human position.
Well, okay, if you're interested in the long-term project of the questioner, namely dissolving state and corporate power, you should be paying attention to that and you should be organizing workers on that. You shouldn't leave it to Rush Limbaugh to organize people with real legitimate grievances—you know, that's the way to fascism. You should be out there organizing them themselves, on their concerns. You know, their concerns can be related to, and easily related to, much longer-term anarchist-style projects, but that's where anarchists should be working. And the same is true in every other part of the society.
I mean, look, some of the things that are going on now are kind of surreal, but would offer real opportunities for anarchist organizing. So let me take another one. The tendency in the economy for the last 30 years by state-corporate planning—and these things don't happen from out of the blue—has been towards financializing the economy. And corollary to that is undermining domestic production. Okay? The two go together. So, for example, the share of financial institutions in GDP, you know, gross domestic product, was maybe 3 percent back in 1970; now it's approaching a third. And, concomitantly, productive industry is being dismantled, which is fine for the owners, you know, great with them if they can produce in, you know, Mexico or in China or something, but it's terrible for communities and workers. At the same time, it's finally being recognized—even by the corporate elite, which has been fighting bitterly against it for years—that there's a real environmental crisis coming, and they're going to lose what they own. So they want to do something about it. And so what they're now kind of timidly saying is, well, we shouldn't—not be the only country in the industrial world that doesn't have high-speed rail; we should have high-speed rail—a minimal but significant move towards dealing with a severe potential crisis. Well, right at this moment the government and the corporations are dismantling productive industry, say in Michigan and Indiana, by closing GM plants and so on and sending the production abroad, or—you know, they're doing that; that's one thing they're doing. The other thing that's happening is that Obama's transportation secretary is in Europe, in Spain, using federal stimulus money, namely taxpayer money, to try to get contracts for Spanish firms to provide high-speed rail that the United States needs. Can you think of a better—I mean, it's hard to think of a more dramatic criticism of the state-corporate socioeconomic system. Here are communities and workforces being destroyed, while we, while their tax money goes to purchase in Spain what they could be producing themselves.
Now, if you can't organize about that, you're really in trouble: you're not a movement at all. Of course, should the—take, say, the workers in Gary, Indiana, or Flint, Michigan, and so on. Do they have to just sit and watch this happen? No. They can take over the workplaces, the factories. They can run them themselves. They can convert them. It's been done before, with much greater conversion, during the Second World War, to wartime production. They don't need state support for that, 'cause that's the only institution that exists and the only one that people can influence. You can't influence a private tyranny. You can influence the government. It's often been done. It would take some support, but nowhere near as much as bailing out Goldman Sachs and so on. It would take some, it would take a lot of popular support, but it can be done. I mean, it can even be done within the framework of conservative economic theory, which is pretty straight about this. I mean, you read textbooks on corporations that say, well, you know, it's not graven in stone that they should work only for the benefit of shareholders, which means a tiny percentage of wealthy shareholders; they can work in the interests of stakeholders, meaning workforce and community. And they're not going to decide to do that, but the workforce and the community can decide it for them. Those are perfectly feasible efforts. In fact, it's been done; you know, there are cases where it's been done. There's cases where it's even been tried on a very large scale. Like, U.S. Steel came close to succeeding, and could with more corporate support.
Well, you know, these are—I could go on with this, but these are real organizing strategies which combine short-term efforts, which confront real problems that people face in their everyday lives, with long-term objectives like creating part of the basis for a society based on free association and solidarity and popular control and so on, and it's sitting right there in front of our eyes. Those, in my view, are the things we should be looking at, not abstract questions like should we try to destroy the state, for which we have no strategy. My feeling is that's the kind of direction in which thinking ought to move. It doesn't mean giving up your long-term goals. In fact, that's the way to realize them. And if there's another way to realize them, I've never heard of it.
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I guess the question that comes to mind that just grows out of these comments is there's a very large number of people who are committed sincerely and rightly to the kind of long-term objectives that anarchists have always tried to uphold. And the question is: why can't we get together and decide on—and instead of, you know, condemning one another for not doing things exactly the way we do, why can't we try to formulate concrete proposals which combine two properties? One, dealing with the real problems that people face in their immediate, daily lives—if you're going to get anywhere, you're going to have to deal with those, and it's not just for tactical reasons, it's also out of simple humanity. So on the one hand those, while maintaining as your guidelines the conception of the kind of just and free society that you would like to bring into being through these steps. And sometimes the two are very close together, as in the case that I mentioned, like takeover of a productive enterprise by a workforce and communities, which is not—you know, it's a feasible objective, and one that has great deal of appeal, or would have if it were put forward, as do others, and combines both long-term vision and the short-term dealing with real, existing grievances and problems. And there are quite a few things like that. So the question is: why not focus on that rather than on abstract questions, such as what's the best strategy for destroying state? Answer: well, no best strategy, 'cause nobody's proposed any.
Do you currently see an elephant room of cognitive science, just like you named one 50 years ago—I guess that's a reference to my critique of radical behaviorism—something that needs addressing that gets too little attention?
Well, one thing that I think gets too little attention in the room of cognitive science is cognitive science. Most of the work that's done just doesn't seem to me to bear on cognitive science. I could pick up a couple of journals here and give examples.
Cognitive science ought to be concerned—should be just a part of biology. It's concerned with the nature, the growth, the development, maybe ultimately the evolution, of a particular subsystem of the organism, namely the cognitive system, which should be treated like the immune system or the digestive system, the visual system, and so on. When we study those systems, there are a number of questions we ask.
One question is of course, you know, what they are: can we characterize them? But that's almost totally missing in cognitive science. I mean, take my own particular area of interest, language. A ton of work in what's called "cognitive science" on what they call "language", but it's very rare to see some effort to characterize what it is. Well, if you can't do that, it doesn't make much difference what else you do.
The second kind of question you have to ask about any organ, if you like (some use the term loosely), subsystem of the body, is how it gets the way it is. So how does it go from some initial state, which is genetically determined, to whatever state it assumes? And in investigating that topic, there are a number of different factors that you can take apart for analytic purposes. And one is the specific genetic constitution that's related specifically to this system. It doesn't mean that every piece of it is used only for this system, but just whatever combination of genetically determined properties happens to determine that you have a mammalian rather than an insect visual system, for example, or a gut-brain, or whatever it may be. That's one. The second is whatever data are outside that modify the initial state to yield some attained state. And the third is: how do laws of nature enter into the growth and development of the system? Which of course they do, overwhelmingly. I mean, nobody, for example, assumes that you have a particular genetic program to determine that cells split into spheres, not cubes, let's say—that's due to, you know, minimization of energy, other laws of nature. And the same holds throughout the course of development. Of course, the same is true for evolution. Evolution takes place with a specific physical, chemical channel of options and possibilities, and physical laws enter all the time into determining what goes on.
And the third question is that—it's kind of like a "why" question: why is the system this way and not some other way? Well, there again you go back into—at this point you really are facing, first of all, just historical accidents like, you know, an asteroid hit the Earth. But more significantly, how do the physical and chemical properties of the universe enter into determining that certain evolutionary changes take place under particular circumstances?
Well, that's the array of questions that ought to be asked. It is very hard to find any focus on these questions, at least in the areas of cognitive science that I'm particularly interested in, like language, for example. What you have is extreme efforts, which are sometimes extremely strange, to try to show that trivial problems for which we basically know the answers, and have for 60 years, can be somehow dealt with by massive data analysis. And so I could give examples, but—and, in fact, I've written about examples. But I think it's kind of off track.
I'd like to see cognitive science focus on the topics that it ought to be addressing. Now, this is a very broad brush, so a lot of it does, and there's very good work in cognitive science, but it's in my opinion much too restricted, and a lot of time and effort is spent—in my view largely wasted—on the peripheral issues which just don't make any sense which [when] you look at them, and efforts which just collapse, and constantly. In fact, many of them are a kind of a residue of the radical behaviorism that the field sought to overcome as it developed. I could give examples, but it's—a very general, broad-brush feeling—unfair to a lot of very good work. But we're trying to pick out tendencies which I think are off track and missing things.
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The second comes from TheSilentNumber:
What are some of your criticisms of today's anarchist movement? How to be as effective as possible is something many anarchists overlook, and you're perhaps the most prolific voice on this topic, so your thoughts would be very influential.
Well, don't agree with the last comment, but my criticisms of today's anarchist movement are a little bit like the critique of cognitive science. What is today's anarchist movement? I mean, there's quite a lot of people, in fact, you know, an impressive number of people, who think of themselves as being committed in some fashion to what they call "anarchism". But is there an anarchist movement? I mean, can one think of—you know, is there something like, say, during the day—.
Twenty years ago I happened to be in Madrid. That happened to be May Day. And there were huge demonstration—May Day demonstration, hundreds of thousands of people from the CMT, the old anarchist labor organization. Well, you can have all kinds of criticisms of the anarchist movements in Spain and so on, but at least there was something to point to, there was something there, there was something to criticize or to support or to try to change or whatever.
But today's anarchism in the United States, as far as I can see, is extremely scattered, highly sectarian, so each particular group is spending a great deal of his time attacking some other tendency—sometimes doing useful, important things, but it's extremely hard to—. I think what is—this is not just true of people who think of themselves as anarchists, but of the entire activist left. Count noses. There's plenty of people, I mean, more than there were at any time in the past that I can think of, except for maybe, you know, tiny, ["pyoosh"], very brief moment late '60s, or CIO organizing in the ' 30s, and things like that. But there are people interested in all sorts of things. You know, you walk down the main corridor at this university, you see, you know, desks of students, very active, very engaged, lots of great issues, but highly fragmented. There's very little coordination. There's a tremendous amount of sectarianism and intolerance, mutual intolerance, insistence on, you know, my particular choice as to what priorities ought to be, and so on.
So I think the main criticism of the anarchist movement is that it just ought to get its act together and accept divisions and controversies. You know, we don't have the answers to—we have, maybe, guidelines as to what kind of a society we'd like, not specific answers; nobody knows that much. And there's certainly plenty of range—of room for quite healthy and constructive disagreement on choice of tactics and priorities and options, but I just see too little of that being handled in a comradely, civilized fashion, with a sense of solidarity and common purpose.
As to how to be as effective as possible, yeah, that's exactly the point: what should we address? You don't have to give a list of severe problems that the world faces. Some of them are extremely severe. So, for example, there are really questions of species survival, literally, at least two, maybe more. One of them is the existence of nuclear weapons. Somebody watching from Mars would think it's a miracle that we've survived for the last 60 years, and it's extremely dangerous right now, so I can't see how that can fail to be a priority. And the other is a looming environmental crisis. And that is something that anarchists in particular should be very dedicated to addressing, because it involves—on the one hand, it does involve questions of technology, like, you know, can you get solar power to work and so on.
And the antiscience tendency in anarchism, which does exist, is completely self-defeating on this score. I mean, it is going to take, it is going to require sophisticated technology and scientific discoveries to create the possibility for human society to survive—I mean, unless we decide, well, it just shouldn't survive, we should get down to, you know, 100,000 hunter-gatherers or something. Okay, except for that, if you're serious about, you know, the billions of people in the world who—and their children and grandchildren, it's going to require scientific and technological advances.
But it's also going to require radical social change. I mean, there's been a—particularly in the United States, but it's true elsewhere, too, there have been, you know, massive state-corporate social engineering projects—very self-conscious; they don't hide what they are doing—since the Second World War to try to construct a social system that is based critically on wasteful exploitation of fossil fuels. You know, that's what it means to suburbanize, to build highways and destroy railroads, and so on through the whole gamut of planning that's been undertaken. Well, you know, that means very substantial social changes in order, and anarchists ought to be thinking about it.
You know, thinking about it doesn't just mean I'd like to have a free and just society; you know, that's not thinking about it. We have to make a distinction if we want to be effective. That's the question: if we want to be effective, we have to make a distinction between what you might call proposals and advocacy. I mean, you can propose that everybody ought to live in peace, love each other, we shouldn't have any hierarchy, everyone should cooperate, and so on. Okay? It's a nice proposal, okay for an academic seminar somewhere.
Advocacy requires more than just proposal. It means setting up your goals (proposal), but also sketching out a path from here to there (that's advocacy). And the path from here to there almost invariably requires small steps. It requires recognition of social and economic reality as it exists, and ideas about how to build the institutions of the future within the existing society, to quote Bakunin, but also to modify the existing society. That means steps have to be taken that accommodate reality, that don't deny it's existence ("Since I don't like it, I'm not going to accommodate it"). These are the only ways to be effective.
You know, you can see that if you look at, you know, the serious, substantial anarchist journals. Like, take, say, Freedom in England, which maybe is the oldest or one of the oldest anarchist journals, that's been around, you know, forever. If you read its pages, most of it is concerned with mild reformist tactics. And that's not a criticism. It should be. It should be concerned with workers rights, with specific environmental issues, with problems of poverty and suffering, with imperialism, and so on. Yeah, that's what it should be concerned with if you want to advocate long-term, significant social change towards a more free and just society, and I can't think of any other way to be effective. Otherwise, the insistence on purity of proposal simply isolates you from effectiveness in activism, and even from reaching, from even approaching your own goals; and it does lead to the kind of sectarianism and narrowness and lack of solidarity and common purpose that I think has always been a kind of pathology of marginal forces, the left in particular. But it is particularly dangerous here.
~~
Which gets to the next sentence, from BerserkRL. It's a long question, but I'll just summarize it:
As far as we favor a stateless society in the long run, it would be a mistake to work for the elimination—I've said that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of the state in the short run, and we should be trying to strengthen the state, 'cause it's needed on the check of power of large corporations. Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research—my own, too—is to show that the power of large corporations derives from state privilege, and governments tend to get captured by concentrated private interests. That would seem to imply that the likely beneficiaries of a more powerful state is going to be the same corporate elite we're trying to oppose. So if business both derives from the state and is so good at capturing the state, why isn't abolishing the state a better strategy for defeating business power than enhancing the state's power would be?
Well, there's a very simple answer to that: it's not a strategy, and since it's not a strategy at all, there can't be a better strategy. The strategy of "eliminating the state" is back on the level of "let's have peace and justice". How do you proceed to eliminate the state? Okay? Can you think of a way of doing it? I mean, if there were a way of doing it in the existing world, everything would collapse and be destroyed. You just can't do it. I mean, there is nothing to replace it. If there was a rich, powerful network of, you know, cooperatives, community organizations, worker-controlled industry, you know, extending over the whole country, and the whole world, in fact, yeah, then you can talk about eliminating states. But to talk about eliminating the state in the world as it exists is simply to keep yourself in some remote academic seminar or small group, you know, saying, "Gee, this would be nice." It's not a strategy, so there can't be a better strategy. We are faced with realities. What is described here, and in fact it's true (I've written plenty about it, too), is that we have a number of systems of power, closely interlinked. One of them's corporate power, business power. That's by far the most dangerous of all. That means, effectively, unaccountable private tyrannies. A second, pretty closely linked to them, is state power. And the comment is correct (as the commentator says, I've written about it, too, a lot) that state power tends to be overwhelmingly influenced by concentrated private power.
Okay, those are real problems. Now we face strategies. So, for example, say—take, say, health care, okay? Right on the front pages. What's the strategy for dealing with the fact that tens of millions of people can't get—the best health care they can get is to be dragged to an emergency room when it's too late to do anything? I mean, that's a real problem, and that's a huge part of the population. Second problem is that in a privatized, unregulated health-care system like the United States'—I shouldn't say "like," because it's the only one. In a privatized, unregulated health-care system where the drug companies are so powerful that the government isn't even allowed to negotiate drug prices, in that kind of system, first of all, health care is strictly rationed by wealth, very strictly, and secondly, it is designed in such a way that the federal budget is going to be destroyed. You just take a look at the tendency lines. There won't be anything left for schools, for Social Security, for worker safety, anything. What'll be left is for the military. That's untouchable. It keeps going up—another problem we've got to look at. Obama has the biggest military budget since the Second World War. But as long as that is over there, untouchable, another elephant in the closet, the radically inefficient privatized, unregulated health-care system, is extremely harmful for people, except for the wealthy—you know, they do fine—and is also going to destroy everyone else.
So what we do about it? Well, it's not a strategy to say, okay, let's abolish the state. That doesn't do anything about it, and in fact it's just a gift to the corporate state power sector 'cause it offers nothing. A short-term answer is to do what the large majority of the population has wanted for decades, namely, to develop a sensible national health-care system of the kind that every other industrial country has, one variety or another. Well, it happens to be a large majority opinion, so you don't have to break down many walls to organize people about it. It has been for decades. It's strongly opposed by the corporate-state nexus, but that's not unbreakable; you know, bigger victories have been won. We could go into details, you know, like what you do about the fact that the Democrats have sold out, for obvious reasons, on even minor palliatives like a public option and so on. What do you do about the fact, a very concrete fact—. There was just an election in Massachusetts which surprised everyone totally—almost completely misrepresented, but I won't go into that. But one of the striking things about the election was that the union members, Obama's natural constituency, most of them didn't bother voting 'cause there was tremendous apathy in the poor, working-class areas. (The election was won by the wealthy suburbs.) But of those who voted, most of them voted for Scott Brown, the Republican, against the Democrats—shooting themselves in the foot, incidentally, 'cause one of the first things that happened is to knock off one possibly pro-union member from the National Labor Relations Board. But they had reasons, and the reasons are very clear—just read the labor press. The reasons are that Obama made it very explicit that he was willing to compromise or give up on everything except one thing: taxing union members for their health-care plans. So, sure, people are enraged about that. I mean, why shouldn't they be? It's not an anarchist position; it's just a simple, elementary, human position.
Well, okay, if you're interested in the long-term project of the questioner, namely dissolving state and corporate power, you should be paying attention to that and you should be organizing workers on that. You shouldn't leave it to Rush Limbaugh to organize people with real legitimate grievances—you know, that's the way to fascism. You should be out there organizing them themselves, on their concerns. You know, their concerns can be related to, and easily related to, much longer-term anarchist-style projects, but that's where anarchists should be working. And the same is true in every other part of the society.
I mean, look, some of the things that are going on now are kind of surreal, but would offer real opportunities for anarchist organizing. So let me take another one. The tendency in the economy for the last 30 years by state-corporate planning—and these things don't happen from out of the blue—has been towards financializing the economy. And corollary to that is undermining domestic production. Okay? The two go together. So, for example, the share of financial institutions in GDP, you know, gross domestic product, was maybe 3 percent back in 1970; now it's approaching a third. And, concomitantly, productive industry is being dismantled, which is fine for the owners, you know, great with them if they can produce in, you know, Mexico or in China or something, but it's terrible for communities and workers. At the same time, it's finally being recognized—even by the corporate elite, which has been fighting bitterly against it for years—that there's a real environmental crisis coming, and they're going to lose what they own. So they want to do something about it. And so what they're now kind of timidly saying is, well, we shouldn't—not be the only country in the industrial world that doesn't have high-speed rail; we should have high-speed rail—a minimal but significant move towards dealing with a severe potential crisis. Well, right at this moment the government and the corporations are dismantling productive industry, say in Michigan and Indiana, by closing GM plants and so on and sending the production abroad, or—you know, they're doing that; that's one thing they're doing. The other thing that's happening is that Obama's transportation secretary is in Europe, in Spain, using federal stimulus money, namely taxpayer money, to try to get contracts for Spanish firms to provide high-speed rail that the United States needs. Can you think of a better—I mean, it's hard to think of a more dramatic criticism of the state-corporate socioeconomic system. Here are communities and workforces being destroyed, while we, while their tax money goes to purchase in Spain what they could be producing themselves.
Now, if you can't organize about that, you're really in trouble: you're not a movement at all. Of course, should the—take, say, the workers in Gary, Indiana, or Flint, Michigan, and so on. Do they have to just sit and watch this happen? No. They can take over the workplaces, the factories. They can run them themselves. They can convert them. It's been done before, with much greater conversion, during the Second World War, to wartime production. They don't need state support for that, 'cause that's the only institution that exists and the only one that people can influence. You can't influence a private tyranny. You can influence the government. It's often been done. It would take some support, but nowhere near as much as bailing out Goldman Sachs and so on. It would take some, it would take a lot of popular support, but it can be done. I mean, it can even be done within the framework of conservative economic theory, which is pretty straight about this. I mean, you read textbooks on corporations that say, well, you know, it's not graven in stone that they should work only for the benefit of shareholders, which means a tiny percentage of wealthy shareholders; they can work in the interests of stakeholders, meaning workforce and community. And they're not going to decide to do that, but the workforce and the community can decide it for them. Those are perfectly feasible efforts. In fact, it's been done; you know, there are cases where it's been done. There's cases where it's even been tried on a very large scale. Like, U.S. Steel came close to succeeding, and could with more corporate support.
Well, you know, these are—I could go on with this, but these are real organizing strategies which combine short-term efforts, which confront real problems that people face in their everyday lives, with long-term objectives like creating part of the basis for a society based on free association and solidarity and popular control and so on, and it's sitting right there in front of our eyes. Those, in my view, are the things we should be looking at, not abstract questions like should we try to destroy the state, for which we have no strategy. My feeling is that's the kind of direction in which thinking ought to move. It doesn't mean giving up your long-term goals. In fact, that's the way to realize them. And if there's another way to realize them, I've never heard of it.
~~
I guess the question that comes to mind that just grows out of these comments is there's a very large number of people who are committed sincerely and rightly to the kind of long-term objectives that anarchists have always tried to uphold. And the question is: why can't we get together and decide on—and instead of, you know, condemning one another for not doing things exactly the way we do, why can't we try to formulate concrete proposals which combine two properties? One, dealing with the real problems that people face in their immediate, daily lives—if you're going to get anywhere, you're going to have to deal with those, and it's not just for tactical reasons, it's also out of simple humanity. So on the one hand those, while maintaining as your guidelines the conception of the kind of just and free society that you would like to bring into being through these steps. And sometimes the two are very close together, as in the case that I mentioned, like takeover of a productive enterprise by a workforce and communities, which is not—you know, it's a feasible objective, and one that has great deal of appeal, or would have if it were put forward, as do others, and combines both long-term vision and the short-term dealing with real, existing grievances and problems. And there are quite a few things like that. So the question is: why not focus on that rather than on abstract questions, such as what's the best strategy for destroying state? Answer: well, no best strategy, 'cause nobody's proposed any.
reddit.com Interviews Noam Chomsky
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Chomsky: Rekindling Radical Imagination
Rekindling the Radical Imagination - Piven, Jones, Roy & Chomsky
Monday, May 10, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
Chomsky: Apartheid Paradigm
NOAM CHOMSKY: Before saying a word, I’d like to express some severe personal discomfort, because anything I say will be abstract and dry and restrained. The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it’s likely to harm them. We have to face the reality that our actions have consequences, and they have to be adapted to real-world circumstances, difficult as it may be to stay calm in the face of shameful crimes in which we are directly and crucially implicated.
Well, I’ve been asked to talk about the apartheid paradigm and the proper response here, so I’ll do that, though not without some additional reservations. We have to recognize that there will be no clear answer as to the question of whether the apartheid paradigm applies in Israel or in Boston, right here, or elsewhere. The genre has, after all, only one example: South Africa. And there are similarities elsewhere in many dimensions, and it’s fair enough to bring them up, but there’s very little point debating whether they are close enough in one or another case to count as apartheid, because that will never be settled, we know that in advance.
I’ve brought up similarities in the past, when I thought that they were appropriate. Actually, the one time I recall clearly was exactly ten years ago. That was at a conference at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. It was on the anniversary of the thirtieth year of the military occupation. And in the talk there, I quoted from a standard history of South Africa on elections in the Bantustans, which I’ll read; and just change a few words, and you’ll know what it’s about.
“South African retention of effective power, through its officials in the Bantustans, its overwhelming economic influence and security arrangements, gave to this initiative of elections elements of a farce. However, unlikely candidates as were the Bantustans for any meaningful independent existence, their expanding bureaucracies provided jobs for new strata of educated Africans tied to the system in a new way and a basis for accumulation for a small number of Africans with access to loans and political influence. Repression, too, could be indigenized through developing homeland policy and army personnel. On the fringe of the Bantustans, border industry growth centers were planned as a means of freeing capital from some of the restraints imposed on industrial expansion elsewhere and to take advantage of virtually captive and particularly cheap labor. Within the homelands, economic development was more a matter of advertising brochures than actual practical activity, though some officials in South Africa understood the needs from their own perspective for some kind of revitalization of the homelands to prevent their economies from collapsing even further.”
Well, I won’t waste time expressing the similarities to the Occupied Territories, but you can do that quite easily. Ten years ago, that was the optimistic prospect for the Occupied Territories. By now, even that’s remote, and reality is far more grim than it was then. There’s no time and, I presume, no need to review the harrowing details.
We’re now approaching George Bush’s historic Annapolis conference, as it’s called, on Israel-Palestine, so we can anticipate a flood of deceit and distortions to set the proper framework. And we should be prepared to counter the propaganda assault, which has already begun. Just to pick a couple of examples, Bostonians could read in the Boston Globe a few days ago that at the Taba Conference in January 2001—now quoting—“Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted ideas floated by President Bill Clinton that would have produced a Palestinian state in 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza,” but these forthcoming gestures failed. The evil Palestinians refused Israel’s generous offers, keeping to their time-honored insistence on seizing defeat from the jaws of victory and proving they’re not partners for negotiation.
Well, there’s one fragment of truth in this conventional fabrication: there was a conference in Taba. And, in fact, it did come close to a possible settlement, but the rest is pure invention. In particular, the conference was terminated abruptly by Prime Minister Barak. The truth is completely unacceptable, so the facts are either suppressed, as they generally are, or, as in this case, just inverted. And we can expect a good deal more of that. Actually, the truth about the Taba Conference merits attention. That week, in one week in January 2001, that was the one moment in thirty years when the United States and Israel abandoned the rejectionist stance that they have maintained in virtual isolation until the present.
And that may suggest some thoughts about another familiar fairytale that you could read about a couple of days earlier in the New York Times, where the respected policy analyst and former high government official, Leslie Gelb, wrote that every US administration since 1967 has privately favored returning almost all of the territory to the Palestinians for the purposes of creating a separate Palestinian state. Note the word “privately.” Crucial. We know what the administrations have said publicly. Publicly they have rejected adamantly anything remotely of the sort ever since 1967—’76, when the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international border, incorporating all the relevant wording of UN 242—it’s the basic diplomatic document to which Washington appeals when it’s convenient. The US veto—it’s worth bearing in mind—is a double veto. One part of the veto is that the actions are barred, of course. And it’s also vetoed from history, as in this case, so you’ll work really hard to find it, even in the scholarly literature.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Sometimes the public rejection of a separate Palestinian state is more articulate and considerably more extreme, so it takes a George Bush no. 1, who is reputed to be the most hostile to Israel of US presidents. In 1988, as you know, the Palestinian National Council formally accepted a two-state settlement, and the Israeli government responded. This was the coalition government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. They responded by issuing a formal declaration that there can be no additional Palestinian state between Jordan and Palestine—“additional” because for Shimon Peres and his Labor coalition, Jordan already was a Palestinian state. It’s a view that’s attributed to the right wing, but that’s mistaken. This is Shimon Peres. The United States reacted to that with what was called the Baker Plan—James Baker, Secretary of State. The Bush Baker Plan endorsed Israel’s position without qualification and went on to add that any Palestinian negotiators would have to accept that framework, namely no second Palestinian state in addition to Jordan. That’s Bush no. 1, the alleged critic of Israel, and the respected diplomat James Baker. Again, the truth is inconvenient, so virtually none of this was reported, and you’ll have to work—search hard to extricate it from the web of self-serving propaganda that dominates commentary and reporting, of which Leslie Gelb’s article in the New York Times is a typical, but not unusual, example.
Well, I’m not going to go on with that, but the diplomatic record is one of uniform rejectionism, apart from the week in Taba, and unilateral rejectionism, increasingly so. By now, virtually the entire world agrees on the two-state international consensus of the past thirty years, pretty much along the lines that were almost agreed upon at Taba. That includes all the Arab States, who actually go beyond to call for full normalization of relations with Israel. It includes Iran, although you won’t find that published here, which accepts the Arab League position. It includes Hamas; its leaders have repeatedly endorsed, called for a two-state settlement, even in articles in the US press. That also includes Hamas’s most militant figure, Khaled Meshaal, who’s in exile in Syria. And it includes the rest of the world. Israel rejects it, and the United States backs that rejection fully, not in words just, but in actions.
Bush no. 2 has gone to new extremes in rejectionism. He’s declared the illegal West Bank settlements must remain part of Israel. That’s in accord with the Clinton position, expressed by his negotiator Dennis Ross, who explained that what he called “Israel’s needs” take precedence over Palestinian wants. That’s Clinton. But the party line remains undisturbed. Facts don’t matter. Bush, Rice and the rest are yearning to realize Bush’s vision of a Palestinian state—somewhere, someplace—persisting in the noble endeavor of the longtime honest broker.
Well, what’s happened in the past is—of course, rejectionism goes far beyond words. It includes settlement programs, the annexation wall, closures, checkpoints, and so on. Settlements increased steadily right through the Oslo years, peaking actually in Clinton’s last year, the year 2000, right before the Camp David Accords. And the story is now being repeated before our eyes—shouldn’t surprise us.
So to take just one example, with the Annapolis conference approaching, Israel has just confiscated more Arab land to build a bypass road from Palestinians—I’m quoting now—“in order to push the Palestinian traffic between Bethlehem and Ramallah deep into the desert and effectively bar Palestinians from the central part of the West Bank." That’s part of the so-called E1 project, which is designed to incorporate the town of Ma’ale Adumim within Israel and effectively to bisect the West Bank. “With such policies”—continuing to quote—“With such policies enacted by the government, the famous Annapolis conference is emptied of all meaning long before it convenes.” This is quotes from the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom. All of this is backed by the honest brokers in Washington and paid for by US taxpayers, who, incidentally, overwhelmingly join the international consensus, in opposition to their own government. But that’s not what we’re going to hear.
Well, in fairness, it should be added that there is occasional public criticism of the settlement programs. So in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, there was a favorable review of a very important study, which has just been translated into English, Lords of the Land by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, which bitterly condemns the US-backed Israeli programs in the West Bank and the takeover of Israeli political life by their advocates. It’s a strong and important book.
The review, however, goes on with conventional fairytales. Among them, it tells us that within the Green Line in Israel itself, Israel is what it calls a “vibrant democracy” in which non-Jews have equal rights and, unlike the West Bank, there are no Arab villages made inaccessible, because their roads have been dug up by army bulldozers. Well, again, there’s a fragment of truth in the description. So take, for example, the village Dar al-Hanoun in the so-called Triangle, Wadi Ara, it’s older than the state of Israel, but it’s one of the innumerable unrecognized villages in Israel. So it’s true that there’s no road dug up by bulldozers, and the reason is that there’s no road. No road is permitted by the state authorities, and no construction is permitted. No services are provided. That’s not an unusual situation for Palestinian citizens, who are also effectively barred from over 90% of the land by a complex and intricate web of laws and administrative arrangements. Technically, that was overruled by the high court seven years ago, but, as far as I can determine, only technically. And we may recall that in the United States it took over a century for even formal implementation of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights to all persons, and actual implementation of it is still remote a century-and-a-half later.
Well, let’s turn briefly to the important question, the most important question: what can we do about it? Here, it’s useful to think about the apartheid analogy, and it’s useful to remember a little history.
In 1963, the UN Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures—sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns—some organized by popular movements. Now, not all countries participated. In the United States, the US Congress did impose sanctions over Reagan’s veto, but US trade with South Africa then increased by various evasions, along with concealed support for South African terrorist atrocities in Mozambique and Angola, which took a horrendous toll. It’s about 1.5 million killed and over $60 billion in damage during the Reagan years, the Reagan years of constructive engagement, according to UN analysis. In 1988, the Reagan administration declared Mandela’s African National Congress to be one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups—that’s 1988—while it described RENAMO in Mozambique merely as an indigenous insurgent group. That was after it had just killed about 100,000 people, according to the State Department, with, of course, US-backed African support. Thatcher’s record was similar or maybe worse. But most of this was in secret. There was just too much popular opposition.
And the popular opposition made a difference. There was a very significant anti-apartheid movement decades after the global decision of the Security Council to bring apartheid to an end. In 1965, boycotts and other measures would not have been effective. Twenty years later, they were effective, but that was after the groundwork had been laid by activist, educational and organizing efforts, including within the powerful states, which is what matters in an ugly world.
Well, in the case of Israel-Palestine, the groundwork has not been laid. The quotes that I just gave are perfectly representative examples; you can fill them out in books, yeah. The kind of popular measures that were effective against apartheid by the late 1980s are not only ineffective in the case of Israel-Palestine today, but in fact sometimes backfire in harming the victims. We’ve seen that over and over. It’s going to continue until the organizing and educational efforts make real progress. It’s not just the United States; the European Union is hardly different. So, for example, the European Union does not bar arms deliveries to Israel. It joined the United States in vicious punishment of Palestinians, because they committed the grave crime of voting the wrong way in a free election. And there was very little internal protest in Europe. Populations support the international consensus, but they don’t react when their governments undermine any hope for its realization.
Well, in the coming weeks and the longer term, there’s plenty of educational and organizational activity that will have to be carried out among an American population that happens to be largely receptive, though deluged with propaganda and deceit. And it’s not going to be easy. It’s never been easy. But much harder tasks have been accomplished with dedicated and persistent effort.
Well, I’ve been asked to talk about the apartheid paradigm and the proper response here, so I’ll do that, though not without some additional reservations. We have to recognize that there will be no clear answer as to the question of whether the apartheid paradigm applies in Israel or in Boston, right here, or elsewhere. The genre has, after all, only one example: South Africa. And there are similarities elsewhere in many dimensions, and it’s fair enough to bring them up, but there’s very little point debating whether they are close enough in one or another case to count as apartheid, because that will never be settled, we know that in advance.
I’ve brought up similarities in the past, when I thought that they were appropriate. Actually, the one time I recall clearly was exactly ten years ago. That was at a conference at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. It was on the anniversary of the thirtieth year of the military occupation. And in the talk there, I quoted from a standard history of South Africa on elections in the Bantustans, which I’ll read; and just change a few words, and you’ll know what it’s about.
“South African retention of effective power, through its officials in the Bantustans, its overwhelming economic influence and security arrangements, gave to this initiative of elections elements of a farce. However, unlikely candidates as were the Bantustans for any meaningful independent existence, their expanding bureaucracies provided jobs for new strata of educated Africans tied to the system in a new way and a basis for accumulation for a small number of Africans with access to loans and political influence. Repression, too, could be indigenized through developing homeland policy and army personnel. On the fringe of the Bantustans, border industry growth centers were planned as a means of freeing capital from some of the restraints imposed on industrial expansion elsewhere and to take advantage of virtually captive and particularly cheap labor. Within the homelands, economic development was more a matter of advertising brochures than actual practical activity, though some officials in South Africa understood the needs from their own perspective for some kind of revitalization of the homelands to prevent their economies from collapsing even further.”
Well, I won’t waste time expressing the similarities to the Occupied Territories, but you can do that quite easily. Ten years ago, that was the optimistic prospect for the Occupied Territories. By now, even that’s remote, and reality is far more grim than it was then. There’s no time and, I presume, no need to review the harrowing details.
We’re now approaching George Bush’s historic Annapolis conference, as it’s called, on Israel-Palestine, so we can anticipate a flood of deceit and distortions to set the proper framework. And we should be prepared to counter the propaganda assault, which has already begun. Just to pick a couple of examples, Bostonians could read in the Boston Globe a few days ago that at the Taba Conference in January 2001—now quoting—“Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted ideas floated by President Bill Clinton that would have produced a Palestinian state in 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza,” but these forthcoming gestures failed. The evil Palestinians refused Israel’s generous offers, keeping to their time-honored insistence on seizing defeat from the jaws of victory and proving they’re not partners for negotiation.
Well, there’s one fragment of truth in this conventional fabrication: there was a conference in Taba. And, in fact, it did come close to a possible settlement, but the rest is pure invention. In particular, the conference was terminated abruptly by Prime Minister Barak. The truth is completely unacceptable, so the facts are either suppressed, as they generally are, or, as in this case, just inverted. And we can expect a good deal more of that. Actually, the truth about the Taba Conference merits attention. That week, in one week in January 2001, that was the one moment in thirty years when the United States and Israel abandoned the rejectionist stance that they have maintained in virtual isolation until the present.
And that may suggest some thoughts about another familiar fairytale that you could read about a couple of days earlier in the New York Times, where the respected policy analyst and former high government official, Leslie Gelb, wrote that every US administration since 1967 has privately favored returning almost all of the territory to the Palestinians for the purposes of creating a separate Palestinian state. Note the word “privately.” Crucial. We know what the administrations have said publicly. Publicly they have rejected adamantly anything remotely of the sort ever since 1967—’76, when the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international border, incorporating all the relevant wording of UN 242—it’s the basic diplomatic document to which Washington appeals when it’s convenient. The US veto—it’s worth bearing in mind—is a double veto. One part of the veto is that the actions are barred, of course. And it’s also vetoed from history, as in this case, so you’ll work really hard to find it, even in the scholarly literature.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Sometimes the public rejection of a separate Palestinian state is more articulate and considerably more extreme, so it takes a George Bush no. 1, who is reputed to be the most hostile to Israel of US presidents. In 1988, as you know, the Palestinian National Council formally accepted a two-state settlement, and the Israeli government responded. This was the coalition government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. They responded by issuing a formal declaration that there can be no additional Palestinian state between Jordan and Palestine—“additional” because for Shimon Peres and his Labor coalition, Jordan already was a Palestinian state. It’s a view that’s attributed to the right wing, but that’s mistaken. This is Shimon Peres. The United States reacted to that with what was called the Baker Plan—James Baker, Secretary of State. The Bush Baker Plan endorsed Israel’s position without qualification and went on to add that any Palestinian negotiators would have to accept that framework, namely no second Palestinian state in addition to Jordan. That’s Bush no. 1, the alleged critic of Israel, and the respected diplomat James Baker. Again, the truth is inconvenient, so virtually none of this was reported, and you’ll have to work—search hard to extricate it from the web of self-serving propaganda that dominates commentary and reporting, of which Leslie Gelb’s article in the New York Times is a typical, but not unusual, example.
Well, I’m not going to go on with that, but the diplomatic record is one of uniform rejectionism, apart from the week in Taba, and unilateral rejectionism, increasingly so. By now, virtually the entire world agrees on the two-state international consensus of the past thirty years, pretty much along the lines that were almost agreed upon at Taba. That includes all the Arab States, who actually go beyond to call for full normalization of relations with Israel. It includes Iran, although you won’t find that published here, which accepts the Arab League position. It includes Hamas; its leaders have repeatedly endorsed, called for a two-state settlement, even in articles in the US press. That also includes Hamas’s most militant figure, Khaled Meshaal, who’s in exile in Syria. And it includes the rest of the world. Israel rejects it, and the United States backs that rejection fully, not in words just, but in actions.
Bush no. 2 has gone to new extremes in rejectionism. He’s declared the illegal West Bank settlements must remain part of Israel. That’s in accord with the Clinton position, expressed by his negotiator Dennis Ross, who explained that what he called “Israel’s needs” take precedence over Palestinian wants. That’s Clinton. But the party line remains undisturbed. Facts don’t matter. Bush, Rice and the rest are yearning to realize Bush’s vision of a Palestinian state—somewhere, someplace—persisting in the noble endeavor of the longtime honest broker.
Well, what’s happened in the past is—of course, rejectionism goes far beyond words. It includes settlement programs, the annexation wall, closures, checkpoints, and so on. Settlements increased steadily right through the Oslo years, peaking actually in Clinton’s last year, the year 2000, right before the Camp David Accords. And the story is now being repeated before our eyes—shouldn’t surprise us.
So to take just one example, with the Annapolis conference approaching, Israel has just confiscated more Arab land to build a bypass road from Palestinians—I’m quoting now—“in order to push the Palestinian traffic between Bethlehem and Ramallah deep into the desert and effectively bar Palestinians from the central part of the West Bank." That’s part of the so-called E1 project, which is designed to incorporate the town of Ma’ale Adumim within Israel and effectively to bisect the West Bank. “With such policies”—continuing to quote—“With such policies enacted by the government, the famous Annapolis conference is emptied of all meaning long before it convenes.” This is quotes from the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom. All of this is backed by the honest brokers in Washington and paid for by US taxpayers, who, incidentally, overwhelmingly join the international consensus, in opposition to their own government. But that’s not what we’re going to hear.
Well, in fairness, it should be added that there is occasional public criticism of the settlement programs. So in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, there was a favorable review of a very important study, which has just been translated into English, Lords of the Land by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, which bitterly condemns the US-backed Israeli programs in the West Bank and the takeover of Israeli political life by their advocates. It’s a strong and important book.
The review, however, goes on with conventional fairytales. Among them, it tells us that within the Green Line in Israel itself, Israel is what it calls a “vibrant democracy” in which non-Jews have equal rights and, unlike the West Bank, there are no Arab villages made inaccessible, because their roads have been dug up by army bulldozers. Well, again, there’s a fragment of truth in the description. So take, for example, the village Dar al-Hanoun in the so-called Triangle, Wadi Ara, it’s older than the state of Israel, but it’s one of the innumerable unrecognized villages in Israel. So it’s true that there’s no road dug up by bulldozers, and the reason is that there’s no road. No road is permitted by the state authorities, and no construction is permitted. No services are provided. That’s not an unusual situation for Palestinian citizens, who are also effectively barred from over 90% of the land by a complex and intricate web of laws and administrative arrangements. Technically, that was overruled by the high court seven years ago, but, as far as I can determine, only technically. And we may recall that in the United States it took over a century for even formal implementation of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights to all persons, and actual implementation of it is still remote a century-and-a-half later.
Well, let’s turn briefly to the important question, the most important question: what can we do about it? Here, it’s useful to think about the apartheid analogy, and it’s useful to remember a little history.
In 1963, the UN Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures—sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns—some organized by popular movements. Now, not all countries participated. In the United States, the US Congress did impose sanctions over Reagan’s veto, but US trade with South Africa then increased by various evasions, along with concealed support for South African terrorist atrocities in Mozambique and Angola, which took a horrendous toll. It’s about 1.5 million killed and over $60 billion in damage during the Reagan years, the Reagan years of constructive engagement, according to UN analysis. In 1988, the Reagan administration declared Mandela’s African National Congress to be one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups—that’s 1988—while it described RENAMO in Mozambique merely as an indigenous insurgent group. That was after it had just killed about 100,000 people, according to the State Department, with, of course, US-backed African support. Thatcher’s record was similar or maybe worse. But most of this was in secret. There was just too much popular opposition.
And the popular opposition made a difference. There was a very significant anti-apartheid movement decades after the global decision of the Security Council to bring apartheid to an end. In 1965, boycotts and other measures would not have been effective. Twenty years later, they were effective, but that was after the groundwork had been laid by activist, educational and organizing efforts, including within the powerful states, which is what matters in an ugly world.
Well, in the case of Israel-Palestine, the groundwork has not been laid. The quotes that I just gave are perfectly representative examples; you can fill them out in books, yeah. The kind of popular measures that were effective against apartheid by the late 1980s are not only ineffective in the case of Israel-Palestine today, but in fact sometimes backfire in harming the victims. We’ve seen that over and over. It’s going to continue until the organizing and educational efforts make real progress. It’s not just the United States; the European Union is hardly different. So, for example, the European Union does not bar arms deliveries to Israel. It joined the United States in vicious punishment of Palestinians, because they committed the grave crime of voting the wrong way in a free election. And there was very little internal protest in Europe. Populations support the international consensus, but they don’t react when their governments undermine any hope for its realization.
Well, in the coming weeks and the longer term, there’s plenty of educational and organizational activity that will have to be carried out among an American population that happens to be largely receptive, though deluged with propaganda and deceit. And it’s not going to be easy. It’s never been easy. But much harder tasks have been accomplished with dedicated and persistent effort.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
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