Interview with Noam Chomsky
By Jared Ball
June 14, 2002

The following is an interview with noted MIT scholar and activist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, often referred to as "the most important intellectual in the United States," is a linguist by training who has applied his study of human cognition to the relationship between mass media and society. Furthermore, and most importantly, he has used his analytic skill to support progressive activism worldwide. He joined us by phone from his office in Boston, Massachusetts.

JARED BALL: I know time is short. We want to welcome you to Chaos Or Community! Our primary focus on the show is the African diaspora and issues relating to so-called "people of color." I have a couple of quick questions for you. The first one being: How is the media currently defining United States policy as it relates to a supposed "war on drugs" and "war on terrorism?" And how do those wars actually relate to one another?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, one way they relate to one another is that they're both fraudulent. That is, that something is going on, you can call it war if you like. But it's not about drugs and its not about terror. It's basically a domestic and international counterinsurgency program. Internationally it's a cover for straight counterinsurgency like in places like Colombia which I just came back from a couple of weeks ago.

I was down in the south in areas which were mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous and spent hours talking to people who are poor peasants who had been out of their lands by what amounts to chemical warfare, fumigation. It didn't have anything to do with drugs, there are no drugs there. But it did destroy their coffee bushes, their yucca, asparagus and other crops. It just essentially drove them off the land. And they're either being driven off the land by chemical warfare or fumigation or by paramilitaries who are very closely tied to the military. And you perfectly well see what the long term consequence are, they can see it too. As they are driven out of the hills and valleys and so on the multi-nationals can come in and start strip mining the mountains. Apparently there is a lot of coal easily accessible there if they can just get rid of the people. And they can build damns and hydro-electric plants which are not going to be for {the people} certainly.

JARED BALL: Is this still the…

NOAM CHOMSKY: Drug war… that's what's called the "drug war." A lot of it is just aimed against guerrilla groups. First of all, if it were a serious drug war they would be aiming at the places that are involved in narco-trafficking. A lot of that, in fact, all of the transmission areas up to the north are in the northern part of the country which are under military/paramilitary control and they just don't go after those.

I mean aside from that the whole idea, the fact that we are even talking about it, is so outlandish that you don't know what to say. Does Colombia have the right to fumigate North Carolina or Kentucky? Because they are producing substances there that are far more lethal. More Colombians die from US tobacco than the number of North Americans who die from cocoa. So why don't they have the right to do that? I mean you can't even talk about that its so crazy. In any event, whatever is going on there is just counterinsurgency. Technically its population control. Its not connected with drugs. If you take a look at, say, the incarceration for things like, say, marijuana. Marijuana usage, this is from memory so I might have the data slightly wrong, but my memory is that it peaked around the late '70s. But criminalization was very low. {Usage} declined in the '80s but criminalization went up. Well that's because in the late '70s, if you look who is using {marijuana}, it was mostly rich kids in colleges, you don't put them in jail.

The "drug war" was called at a time when all the statistical indicators made it very clear what was going to happen. There had been a decline, through the '80s, in use of all kinds of substances not just drugs but tobacco, red meat, coffee, all sorts of things… had declined among sort of more educated sectors which happened to be mostly white because of familiar reasons. In wealthier more educated sectors there had been a decline but among the general population which includes Blacks, Latinos and so on, {use} was steady. So if you looked at the trend lines it was pretty clear that calling a "drug war" at the time they did was going to be a way of criminalizing Blacks. And in fact, that was said, like on the floor of the Senate. Senator Moynihan, one of the few senators that pays attention to social statistics, said that if we pass this legislation we are declaring a crime wave among minorities.

JARED BALL: And how much of this is in relation to trying to reduce the revolutionary or rebellious activity in these communities?

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think indirectly maybe, but I think what it has to do with is the growing inequality that's built into the social and economic program. And that's worldwide. US intelligence, for example, predicts that over the next 15-20 years if the processes that they call "globalization," their version of "globalization," continues its going to lead to increasing divide between haves and have-nots, wealthy and poor. Military planners assume the same thing. These are called "boom economic times" but that's just not true. It is for a pretty small percentage of the population. For probably the majority of the population its not true at all. So what you're getting is an increasing divide and a large number of people who sort of don't have any particular function in the service oriented, or the hi-tech, kind of what they call "service financial institutions" - oriented economy. So what do you do with these people? They're all over the world. Billions of them. And a lot of them are here. You've got to get rid of them some way.

Well, you can control them by force. If it's say Colombia maybe you kill them. If its here you put them in jail. In the criminology literature its discussed very frankly. Its called controlling the dangerous classes. The dangerous classes are those you have got to worry about. Because they might be disruptive since they are being left out, and oppressed, and not getting anything. And its not specifically, I mean, the United States happens to be correlated with color but lets say in England during the Industrial Revolution it wasn't. Or for that matter right here where I live, Boston, you go back a century it was the Irish. They're treated just like Blacks are. In fact, it's even true of the medical literature. A lot of modern medicine was based on experimentation with humans, the kind that's not allowed now but wasn't considered outrageous in the 19th century. And very commonly it was slave women and Irish women. They were the poor working-class people and you had to control them.

JARED BALL: Several scholars have written about the fact that Black/African employment only reached 100% in the days of slavery and that ever since that system was revamped rather than ended the Black/African population in America has been reduced to surplus labor that needs to be locked up in pens, disenfranchised, and…

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think there is a lot to that but I think, you know, that there is an overlay of racism in everything that's going on, that can't be denied. But if we sort of take that away, lets not look at that extra part, just look at what's left, there is something else going on. This is a country of immigrants, so when my father came over from eastern Europe about a century ago he could go to work in a sweat shop as an industrial laborer. And if you worked there were ways of getting ahead and finally your son went to college. Well the Black population in the United States at post-slavery, say in the last century, it was kind of an immigrant population. Once the farms were mechanized in the South and the working population was driven off they went to the North, huge immigration to the North.

It's kind of like the immigration from eastern Europe. And during {World War II} they had jobs because there was an industrial economy they could go into just like my father could during the first World War. But in the post-war period the economy changed. It no longer provided a growing employment for industrial workers. That just didn't stand, in fact, declined in the last couple of decades. Well, you know, this left a pretty big immigrant population which happened to be, to a large extent, people of color and they couldn't get absorbed into the growing economy the way the Irish, the Italians and the Jewish population of eastern Europe could a century earlier. There wasn't that kind of growing economy, so they were left unemployed as you say, you know {they were left} kind of out of the growing mainstream economy.

I think if you look at the drug war, what's called the "drug war" domestically, its in large measure an effort to control them. You know, there is a sense in which that was true of Prohibition too. It wasn't really aiming at the rich people up in Westchester county, New York. They could keep drinking wine if they wanted to. But it was aimed at the saloons in downtown New York where you had working-class people. And that's traditionally true, I mean, take a look at the history of Prohibition over a long period. Its usually aimed at what are called the "dangerous classes." People who might get out of control. You have to criminalize them.

JARED BALL: I have just recently completed my first year teaching in the public school system here in DC and more and more over the course of that year the issue of the media's relationship to the population became heightened. Your work became more apart of, not only my own study, but also what I tried to infuse into the classroom. I showed portions of the Manufacturing Consent documentary just to sort of challenge the students to consider what was happening to them as they went home and watched television and video all day. Now, for those of us who recognize the relationship between the United States and its African and Latino populations as a colonial one we are ever mindful of what Malcolm X said some 35 years ago that we live in a time of "image-making." Similarly, Dr. John Henrik Clarke used to talk regularly about the role of misinformation in media and education which is to prepare the world for the "re-enslavement of African people," as he would say or the continued aggressive and rapacious behavior towards the so-called "Third World." Can you explain the role of media and education in enslaving "people of color" particularly the African people from your observations from world travel?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, you know when we're talking about the media we're talking about a small number of major corporations, huge corporations, which are part of the system that dominates the whole economy, society and political life. So the way, not just the United States, but the West is organized power lies very heavily in a few sectors. One of them is concentrated economic power. So big corporations which are more and more merging and becoming oligopolies, small numbers of them who control sectors of the economy, and they're all integrated with one another and they are by now multi-national and are no longer concentrated in particular areas, well the media are just part of that. And, of course, they are very closely linked to state power and to the other international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and so on. So there is this kind of network of power. The business press sometimes calls this "defacto world government" of concentrated centers of power. The way it's supposed to work is that the populations in general are supposed to be kind of marginalized. Their role in this whole system in a democratic country is to be observers, spectators, not participants, that's the phrase. Every once in awhile you go to what's called an "election" and you pick one or another person from this power center to represent you. That's called an "election." Now if you ask where do the media fit into this it would be kind of a miracle if they didn't look at the world and present the world from the point of view of these power centers that they're a part of. It's almost like reflexive, without thinking about it, it's the way you're brought up, it's the way you're trained, it's what's your education is like. As you get into the professions you're sort of taught to do that. If people try to break out of that, and some do, they're usually cut off in one or another way. In a country like this they're not tortured and killed but they're marginalized.

And if you look at the media as businesses, after all they are businesses, these are major corporations selling audiences to other businesses. Say television. CBS doesn't make any money when you turn on your set, it makes money from advertising. So you, the viewer, are essentially the product that CBS is selling to advertisers. So you have a corporation selling viewers to other businesses, and yeah, they're going to represent the interests of the sellers and buyers.

JARED BALL: You mention that in other countries assassinations are far more widespread and imprisonment and torture…

NOAM CHOMSKY: In Colombia, where I just came from, there was around 20 political killings a day. More union activists are killed there than I think the rest of the world combined. The people who were mostly killed were helpless people. I was just there. I spoke to members of an Afro-Colombian community that had just had a big massacre, peasants, these are the people that usually get {killed}…

JARED BALL: Were these people in struggle against what's going on or…?

NOAM CHOMSKY: They're just trying to survive. I mean, there are guerrilla groups, but most, say the Afro-Colombians, they just want to be left alone by everybody. They don't like the guerrillas, they hate, they're scared to death of the paramilitaries, they don't want to have their fields bombed by US fumigation planes. They just want to be allowed to survive.

JARED BALL: But they're inhabiting a region…

NOAM CHOMSKY: They're inhabiting a region of rich resources. They're in the way. They're not contributing to profit-making by the small sectors of the economy. It's a very split society. It's a potentially rich society but a huge amount of poverty and split between rich urban sectors and poor in the cities and rural countryside. And, of course, they don't offer anything to the multi-nationals, they're in their way.

JARED BALL: And do they still constitute one of the top four refugee populations in the world?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yep. They've got 2 million displaced people, internal. That's one of the highest in the world, outside of Africa and for awhile Afghanistan.

JARED BALL: And Colombia still produces more oil for the United States than many Middle Eastern countries, is that correct?

NOAM CHOMSKY: I don't know the exact, yeah, it surely does. And it's right next door to Venezuela. Venezuela is kind of frightening to the United States now because it has a kind of populist social-democratic leadership which the US wouldn't like. Its right next door and it's the major oil supplier.

JARED BALL: We were talking about that on the show last week and how {Venezuelan} president Chavez is not only friends, or friendly at least, with Castro, which I'm sure upset United States leadership. And I just saw a letter that is being passed around the {House of Representatives} requesting people to sign on to a petition to go to Secretary of State Powell saying that if the United States is ever going to allow citizens to openly go to Cuba {they} must turn over the some 75 political exiles, or who the United States is calling "cop killers," particularly in the case of Assata Shakur. In other words {the US} is still holding a grudge against nations like Cuba, and even Haiti. And that president Chavez is friends with Castro and he tried to do two things to move towards nationalizing wealth of the Venezuelan…

NOAM CHOMSKY: He has tried to carry out programs that would benefit the poor population which is, again, the huge majority in a very rich country. That's why he is so popular among the poor. He hasn't been able to do much in part because as soon as you press such programs immediately there is a huge amount of capital flight. The rich people send their money somewhere else, there is a massive media campaign against him… investors back out, plus whatever the United States is doing. It is highly likely that the US is involved with coup preparation.

JARED BALL: Well Greg Palast, we read an article from him in The Guardian (April 17th, 2002) where he talked about the CIA being involved…

NOAM CHOMSKY: …yes, I saw the article and I'm sure he is right. Even without having any evidence, just the history…

JARED BALL: …it just makes sense.

NOAM CHOMSKY: …and, in fact, you can tell by the reaction of the United States to the coup attempt {in Venezuela} a couple of weeks ago. Washington really embarrassed itself badly. The United States is the only country in the hemisphere that didn't condemn the coup and, in fact, welcomed it and then had to back off shame-facedly when a popular uprising overthrew the coup.

JARED BALL: Now I see that I have about 7 minutes left, your assistant asked me to be very mindful of the time, I know you are a busy man. So if I can I'd like to sort of try to combine two questions. One is, how do you respond to those that there is no system in place that determines the development, economically, spiritually, politically of groups of people and why does it seem that the Left, the so-called "Left," is abundant in theory and seems to have little practice to follow it, while the Right has a very, much more narrow, ideological focus and quite a bit of practice behind their…

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it's like asking… suppose you looked at a military dictatorship. You would find that the military dictators don't have much in the way of theory but they have a lot in the way of guns and the population may have ideas about how the country ought to be run but they cant do much about it. Well, this isn't a military dictatorship but, nevertheless, there is very highly concentrated power. So that the decisions over what's going to be produced, what's going to be invested, what's going to appear in the media, what's going to happen on the political system… these decisions are concentrated in quite small sectors of the population. They don't need any theory, they have the power, they do what they want, they institute what they want. So for example, just take the one example you mentioned, a resolution demanding that Cuba return "cop killers." How many resolutions have you seen suggesting that the United States ought to send back large-scale terrorists who we hide here?

The US is a refuge for some of the worst terrorists in the world. Who has been carrying out the terror against Cuba for the last forty years? Where are they? They're in Miami. Who organized the terror in Haiti that killed four or five thousand people? He is sitting in Queens {New York}. The US refuses to extradite him because, even though Haiti has demanded it, because they know perfectly well that if he's tried in Haiti he'll probably spill the beans on contacts between the paramilitary groups he headed Emmanuel Constant and the CIA and the Clinton administration. So sure, we've got killers all over the place and I'm not even talking about the ones who are in office, they're the worst ones. But ordinary retail terrorists who did more than kill a cop, whatever the circumstances, they were involved in substantial terrorist actions, but nobody talks about extraditing them.

Say, for example, take Emmanuel Constant, its kind of a striking case. Here's a guy who was the head of a paramilitary group, FRAP, who was largely responsible for killing four or five thousand people in Haiti in the early 1990s. Vicious terror, I was there for a little while during the height of the terror, it was really scary. These are real monsters. They were working in close connection with the US government, in fact, the US government was undermining the embargo by allowing oil to be sent to the military junta. The Haitian government has been calling on the United States to extradite him. The last time the Aristide government requested that he be extradited was on September 30th last year {2001}. Ok, well, remember what was happening then. That was right at the time when the US and the media were in an uproar over the fact that Afghanistan wasn't handing over Osama ben-Laden. We then went ahead and bombed them, allegedly to force them to turn him over. Well, you know, the US didn't provide any evidence against Osama ben-Laden and it didn't ask for his extradition. When the Taliban made some offers, which may have been serious or not, the US just dismissed them with contempt. The Constant case is quite different. The Haitian government has plenty of evidence against him. There is no doubt of his responsibility. They did call for extradition and it was right at the same moment, just compare the {media} coverage. Well that's the difference between someone who is allegedly involved in killing a couple of thousand Americans and somebody who is involved in killing a couple of thousand poor Haitians.

JARED BALL: So how do we get people, in the three minutes we have remaining, how do we get people to focus on this system. Rather than have them turn in fear at the idea of a system but to focus on it in the hopes of understanding how it works to begin to develop strategies to make serious and irreparable changes to it?

NOAM CHOMSKY: The first part of it is things like your radio program. The beginning of any kind of serious action has got to be self-education. You have to really go through a kind of intellectual self-defense to learn how to defend yourself against the propaganda with which you are deluged all the time and to try to understand the world and how it really works. Now that's really hard to do when you're isolated and alone but it's much easier to do when you are part of something. That's one of the main reasons why labor unions were always in the forefront of significant social change, or churches, or civil rights movement, or any other Third World solidarity movement, the anti-apartheid movement or the movements that are called "anti-globalization," they're not anti-globalization. The movements that are calling for a different form of international organization which will benefit people not just investors. The kinds that were meeting in Porto Allegro Brazil last February*, 70,000 people, working people, peasants, environmentalists, all kinds of people all over the world. Those are groups that are organizing and when you're together in an organization you can learn a lot of things, you support one another, you find out things from one another. Even the sciences work that way, nobody sits alone in a laboratory. You learn from other people and from interaction, trying out ideas, and so on. So the first step is education.

The nest step is serious organization. And then you have programs that you want to implement. The system of power may look impregnable but its actually extremely fragile. And the people at the core of the power system know it very well. If the population ever does get organized the system is going to be dismantled and institutions can be put under popular control.

JARED BALL: Well professor Chomsky thank you for your time. And let it be known for the record that this time the issue of concision is yours. We wish you the best in all you efforts and we appreciate the work you've done and we look forward to having you on the show again in the future.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I hope so. Thank you, goodbye.

* Meeting of the World Social Forum

Jared Ball is a founding member of Organized C.O.U.P. He is the host of Chaos Or Community! a community-based, activist-inspired radio program in Washington, DC. Created and hosted by Jared Ball, The Funkinest Journalist, Chaos combines music, news and talk to form an informative and lively show. Our goal is to be nourishment for an informed struggle with the hopes of lifting the plight of the oppressed to the level of open and honest discussion we deserve. For more information on show times and locations please contact chaosorcommunity@onebox.com.