Interview
With Noam Chomsky
By Noam Chomsky
and Timo Stollenwerk
12 June, 2004
ZNet Germany
Oldenburg: In one
chapter of your book Understanding Power - recently published in Germany
under the title Eine Anatomie der Macht - you describe an interview
situation in Canada. The interviewer got angry, cause you started criticizing
Canada and not - as he preferred - the United States. You point out
that one of the reasons for the foreign mainstream press to interview
you is because you criticized the United States, but not the guest country
you're interviewed in. So, I would like to talk to you about what implications
your writing and activism could have for European countries and especially
Germany.
I do try wherever
I go to focus criticism on the country I'm going to but it's not my
main concern. Actually, what happened in Canada was - I remember that
- it's the main national sort of interview program in Canada and every
time I landed in Toronto they were delighted to have me come, and this
one time I decided that I was sick and tired of it. The first question
I was asked was "When did you come?" I said that I just landed
at the war criminal airport, what you called Lester B. Pearson Airport.
He said: "What do you mean, Lester Pearson was a war criminal?"
Then I started running through Lester Pearson's record. He is there
a big hero, Nobel Prize Winner. He has a horrendous record. The guy
was getting red in the face and I sort of went from the air. He just
broke it up and started screaming.
When I was walking
out, you know, they have those switchboards that light up from calls
all over the place - there were calls from all over the country. They
were very angry at him. Not people who liked what I was saying but,
you know, but you just can't act like that. As I left, they said we
would really like you to come back and we'll do this right. I said that
I don't know if I have the time, maybe next time I'm here. They actually
sent a team to Boston for an interview just to calm down their public
but I was never invited back. That has happened a few other times in
Canada and elsewhere.
Oldenburg: Yesterday,
you received the Carl von Ossietzky Prize for your lifework (congratulations)
as someone criticizing US foreign policy, but also for your research
work concerning the function of the media in democratic societies. Together
with Edward Herman you have developed an analytical framework that tries
to explain the performance of the mainstream media in the US. According
to this propaganda model, the media serve the interests of state and
corporate power and present the world view they represent. Do you think
the propaganda model can be applied to the European, respectively, German,
media market as well?
Well, I don't read
the German press regularly, so I can't tell you. But, to the limited
extent I know, yes. And I suspect if the German press were investigated
as intensively as the American press is, one would find the same things.
It's a rather striking fact that media criticism is very heavily concentrated
in the United States. In the United States there are a lot of people
working on this - and there's a lot of analysis and discussion.
In Canada, there's
virtually nothing, in England, there's some, there's a good media institute
in Glasgow and a couple of other things. In France there's very little.
In Germany, as far as I knew up until yesterday, there was none, but
I was told last night by a professor here that they do some work on
it. So, maybe, there's some but I couldn't go into it. But, that's really
a question you'd have to ask yourself. You have to look at your media
systematically. It's not enough to read the papers when you show up
every couple of years. When I do, it seems to me that it's the same
as what I've left behind.
Oldenburg: Do you
think that the range of the media is influenced by the fact that in
Europe we used to have workers' parties, like Social Democrats - they're
disappearing very quickly - but, we used to have that. Do you think
this influenced the range of opinions that appear in the press?
Probably, you'd
expect to. In England - that I know better - there's still a labor movement
and something called Labor Party. But there was a labor-based press
and it was widely read, supported, and effective. The Daily Herald was
the most widely read newspaper in England, with a strong readers' involvement.
It lasted until the early sixties. In fact, in the 1960s the tabloids,
like the Daily Mirror, were labor-based and labor-oriented. This had
been declining for a long time and by the 1960s it sort of ended. Mainly
through processes of capital control and reliance on advertising and
so on.
There is less and
less reflection of the point of view from the world of working people.
Actually, I saw this a couple of days ago in England. I gave talks in
many different places, this was in Liverpool. There was a talk organized
by the dockers who had been sacked a couple of years ago - it was a
big labor incident, hundreds of dockers were thrown out, replaced by
scabs, as part of the efforts to destroy the unions.
This happened to
be post-Thatcher, but it's the same thing. They didn't give up, they
fought quite a struggle about it and they were finally sacked, but they
turned to other activities, cultural activities in Liverpool and political
activities, and among other things they had an annual event and this
was part of the annual event. The audience was just more mixed. Their
kind of point of view of the world does not get to the media. In the
United States, if you go back to the early part of the century, about
a century ago, there was Appeal to Reason, which was kind of a left
social-democratic journal which had the scale of the commercial press.
If you go back to the mid 19th century, there was a very lively workers'
press, and by the 1950s there were still about 800 labor-based newspapers
which reached maybe 20-30 million people, by now it's down to almost
nothing. And gradually, as capital control took over, the independent
media declined.
Every newspaper
used to have a labor columnist, somebody in the paper who covers labor
news, nobody does now. Now sometimes the business correspondent writes
an article on a strike or something but they have all got big business
sections. Every newspaper has separate sections on business but the
idea that they should have separate articles on labor - that is almost
unheard of, which tells you quite a lot.
If, say, you want
the stock market prices you can find them easily, but if you want to
get the wage level, or the work hours, you've got to do some work through
complicated statistics. And, in fact, some information is not even presented
in the United States. The United States is one of the few, maybe the
only, industrial society, where the official data, the government data
- although it's extremely extensive on everything - has no class-based
data. If somebody wants to study, say, health and mortality among industrial
workers as compared with professionals, the only way you can do it is
by working through the data that they do have and working out complicated
correlations. There's a reasonably close race/class correlation and
there are plenty of data on race, and if you work through them and work
through other things, you can figure out some of the class related data...
Oldenburg: In Germany
there are very few data on rich people. On the wealthy end it's very
hard to find out. You have to use the same methods that you described
for the health of the working people if you want to find out who has
what and how much.
Part of the reason
is something different. There are sociological studies on the poor,
but there are very few sociological studies on the rich. Part of the
reason is, they won't talk to you. It's only vulnerable populations
who will let you come in and ask your questions. If you go to a slum
and start asking people questions, maybe they will talk to you. If you
go to the rich suburbs they will throw you out of the house. This is
none of your business - plus other biases attributed to you then.
But it's perfectly
true, anthropological, sociological or psychological studies are mostly
studies of the oppressed. And that's interesting about the data, you
can find data about the distribution of wealth but if you try to look
at things that correlate with it, like health, it's tricky.
In fact, in the
United States people have drilled into their heads that they are all
middle class. My daughter teaches in a state college, where people come
from what we would call working class or less, many of them are just
transients... people are underclass. But, the first day of class she
always asks people "What class do you belong to?" and everybody
says middle class and then she starts bringing out what their aspirations
are. "What you go to college for?", "What is your father
doing?" and so on. It turns out, you know, my father is a janitor,
when he has a job and I'm hoping to be a nurse, but they're middle class.
Everybody is middle class.
Actually, I read
the British press - coming over yesterday. I read an article in one
of what is called the left journals, the Guardian or the Observer. Somebody
had an interview with Michael Moore down in Cannes, and he tries to
write a kind of critical article saying he is a hypocrite and a fraud
and one of the things he said was that the guy pretends to be working
class in his background but the truth is that he was really from the
middle class suburbs. It turns out later that his father was an autoworker
- but that doesn't make him working class. He was able to buy his own
home. This guy was an autoworker and he is faking and pretending to
be working class. I'm sure the writer didn't see anything funny about
it, probably the readers don't see it either.
Oldenburg: In the
discussion about the Gulf War, the German chancellor and the government
have been praised for their anti-war attitude, even though Germany allowed
US warplanes to overfly German airspace on their way to Iraq and to
use NATO infrastructure. Germany also reinforced its own engagement
in Afghanistan so that the US could send more of its own troops to Iraq.
What do you think were the motives for Germany and other European countries
to oppose the US intervention in Iraq?
I don't know enough
about Germany to give a serious answer, but it's kind of an interesting
question. It is the question that ought to be asked: What were the motives
for France and Germany to not go along with the US war? Nobody asks,
why Italy agreed to go along, or why Spain agreed. The fact of the matter
is that their populations were strongly opposed to this war, in fact,
they were more opposed in Italy and Spain than they were in France and
Germany. If anybody believed in democracy - unfortunately nobody does
- but if anybody believed in democracy, they wouldn't ask this question.
There's nothing to ask when a government accepts the same position as
the will of the majority of the population, that's what they're supposed
to do in a democratic society. But, the question only arises for those
who didn't take their orders from Crawford, Texas. You've got some kind
of a problem. The ones who disregarded 90 percent of the population
and took their orders from the boss, no question. As, to why the German
government decided to follow the will of 70 percent of their population,
I don't know. But in a democratic society such a question shouldn't
come up. They shouldn't have a choice. Yes, that is what they should
do or they'd be kicked out.
Oldenburg: Are the
differences between "Old Europe" and the US over Iraq an expression
of a increasing political and economic rivalry between "Old Europe"
and the United States?
The concept of "Old
Europe" is kind of interesting for a number of reasons. It was
invented by Rumsfeld and then picked up by the world. It is standard
in the Western elites. As for the criteria whether a country is in "Old
Europe" or in "New Europe," that's very sharp. A country
is in "Old Europe" if the government, for whatever reason,
took the same position as the vast majority of the population. It's
in "New Europe" if it overruled an even bigger majority of
the population and took its orders from Washington. "Old Europe"
is condemned and "New Europe" is praised and the hope for
the future. This is an expression of such hatred for democracy that
it's indescribable. And it passed virtually without comment.
The most dramatic
case was Turkey. In Turkey 95 percent of the population was opposed
to the war and everybody was surprised: By a slim, small vote the parliament
voted to go along with 95 percent of the population. Colin Powell immediately
told them, they're gonna lose all their aid, Paul Wolfowitz, the great
visionary, condemned the Turkish military because they didn't intervene
to prevent the government from this horrible mistake. He ordered them
to apologize to the United States and recognize that their task is to
help America. He's still the great visionary.
Actually, the press
reacted quite interestingly. Almost All of them condemned Turkey and,
for the first time, they started reporting the Turkish atrocities against
the Kurds in the 1990s - they'd never done that before - but, just to
show how awful the Turks were for not taking orders they started describing
what the Turks had done to the Kurds. Of course, they kept very quiet
about the fact that they were able to do this because they got all the
military aid from the United States and that this aid went up when the
atrocities went up. And, obviously, they (the press) didn't mention
that they themselves had been silent about it when they could have stopped
it. That never comes up.
In fact, Nicholas
Kristof, the New York Times correspondent, had an article on hypocrisy.
That was the topic. It was on the hypocrisy of the Arab states who are
now protesting US atrocities but never protested the atrocities of the
Turks against the Kurds. That's true, that's hypocritical. But, what
about Nicholas Kristof when the atrocities went on, funded by the United
States? If he had talked about it, they might have easily stopped, but
not a word. In fact, now not a word either, nor will anybody make that
comment about him because they don't know or they don't want to talk
about it.
So, that's one criterion,
there's another criterion which more or less correlates with it. "Old
Europe" is the economic, commercial, industrial and financial center
of Europe. "New Europe" is where the fringe is. The U.S. is
deeply concerned since the Second World War, not just now, that Europe
might move to an independent course. By about 1970 it had recovered
enough so that it was economically on a par with the United States.
1973 was "The Year of Europe." Europe was supposed to celebrate
its recovery from the war. Henry Kissinger made an important address
here - the Year of Europe Address - in which the basic theme was that
he told the Europeans that they should keep to their "regional
responsibilities" within the "overall framework of order"
managed by the United States.
Potential European
independence will be rooted in France and Germany, that's the problem.
That's one of the reasons the United States is so interested in EU enlargement.
They figure they can dilute the influence of Europe by bringing in those
former satellites, which they figure, probably correctly, will be more
under US influence. The US wants Turkey in for the same reasons, for
the EU to be more under US influence.
And by now there's
an even bigger threat: Northeast Asia. Northeast Asia is the most rapid-growing
economy in the world, its GDP is well beyond North America's or Europe's,
it's got about half of the financial reserves of the world, they have
resources in Siberia and they could move in an independent direction.
It has two of the biggest industrial economies in the world: Japan and
South Korea. China is growing in the area of the periphery of Eastern
Siberia where there are plenty of resources - a large percentage of
the world's oil reserves, for example.
So, these are the
real problems of global order and a lot of what's going on in the Middle
East has to do with it. The US needs to control the major sources of
energy to ensure that Europe and Asia don't go off on the wrong path.
And, they're partially obedient but, not completely, like, for example,
their policies towards Iran. The US is trying very hard to prevent Europe
and Japan from investing in Iranian oil, but they're doing it. Japan
just made a multi-billion dollar contract for the development of a big
Iranian oil field. The US didn't like it but there's not much they can
do about it and these conflicts are serious.
Part of the reason
for the invasion of Iraq was that France and Russia had the inside track,
they were running the Iraqi oil system - okay, that's finished now.
So, yes, these are issues that go way back.
I mean, in fact,
they involve Germany seriously. In 1952 Stalin made an offer to allow
Germany to be unified with democratic elections - internationally supervised
democratic elections which the Communists would have certainly lost.
He had only one condition, that Germany not be rearmed as part of a
Western military alliance - which made pretty good sense if you take
a look at recent history. That was kind of suppressed in the United
States when it was announced because it was an embarrassing moment,
since they were just trying to get funding for a huge increase in military
spending, but it was kind of leaked out and there was some discussion
about it.
There was a book
by a pretty well known and influential political commentator, James
P. Warburg, of the Warburg family, such a big guy, in which he brought
this up. It was called "Germany, Key to Peace" and came out
1953, and in it he brought this up but he was criticized and he was
bitterly ridiculed: "How could you think that Stalin would have
made peace?" Well, we don't really know. As it turns out in the
Russian archives they were probably serious about it.
Oldenburg: Actually,
what we've learned in history class was that it wasn't a real offer,
that it was just a tactic by Stalin.
That's just not
true. That's what was said at that time but, the way to find out if
it was a tactic was to accept it. To say, okay, let's do it and if he
backs off, then it was a tactic, if he doesn't back off it was real
but they didn't want to do that. And the historians won't state this
simple point. So now, the archives and other materials are coming out
and this increasingly indicates, that it was probably serious - for
one reason because it turns out that the Russians understood very well
how the United States was hoping to drive them into the ground, namely
by an arms race. They knew the US had a much stronger economy, they
couldn't possibly keep up with the United States in military spending.
Even the worst monsters like Beria made the same offer as Stalin about
Germany: to unify Germany with democratic elections, as long as it is
not militarized. And this is one of the worst monsters. Both he and
later Khrushchev said straight out, the United States is trying to spend
us to the ground, we can't compete with this military spending and in
1954, when Khrushchev took over, he offered Eisenhower a proposal to
the effect that both sides should reduce military spending and cut back
offensive military forces. The Eisenhower Administration disregarded
it but they did it anyway, on the Russian side, unilaterally and over
the objections of the Russian generals who didn't like it. Later, they
cut back Russian military forces - offensive forces - quite sharply
and asked the Kennedy Administration to do the same. They thought about
it and what they did was escalate military spending. Then came the Cuban
missile crisis in which the Russians were really humiliated. The Kennedy
Administration went all the way to humiliate them and the Russian military
couldn't take it anymore, they threw Khrushchev out and went in this
mad arms race and they did kind of match the U.S. in military spending,
but they ruined the economy. In fact, if you look at the Russian statistics,
it's in the 1960's when the economy started to stagnate and the health
statistics started to decline and so on and so forth. It's really the
Kennedy Administration that drove them into bankruptcy. If they had
gone along, if they had agreed, it is possible that a Gorbachev figure
might have come along earlier, the world would have been saved from
all sorts of horror, and Russia might have made a smooth transition
to some kind of social-democratic economy, instead of the catastrophe
of the last 10 years. I doubt that they teach you that lesson in history,
either. But among serious scholars this should not really be controversial
anymore.
Even the most anticommunist
scholars, like Adam Ulam, who I happen to have known personally, and
who was a very good Polish-American Sovietologist at Harvard, hated
the Russians, like every Pole, and he was very anti-communist, he died
a few years ago - but, towards the end of his life he started to write
articles on the 1952 offer and said that it looks more and more that
this was really serious: We can't prove it but it was certainly a mistake
to not explore it, so if your teachers are to the right of Adam Ulam,
they're very far to the right, I can tell you.
Oldenburg: There
is a discussion in our intellectual elites about a problem called the
"democracy deficit," with regard to the European Union institutions.
This problem is commonly discussed as a mere public relations problem
- it was understood that democracy meant "a situation where leaders
are accountable and ultimately removable by a majority of people"
and according to this, it was sufficient when the elected parliaments
appointed their representatives for the European institutions. What
is your opinion on that? Does the European Union constitute an attempt
to reduce public influence on politics?
It's interesting
that the right wing in the United States is appalled by the democratic
deficit in Europe. You find articles in Foreign Affairs - that's not
really rightwing but, you know, like mainstream conservatives - that
harshly condemn the independence of the European Monetary Bank which
is highly undemocratic and has a huge impact on European economy - mostly
harmful - and it's completely out of any public control, I mean, it's
much more than the Federal Reserve in the United States, that's been
condemned in Foreign Affairs.
This idea, that
representatives can be removed by their constituencies, is sort of true
if you have actual democratic function, but democratic function means
participation of the public and it's not a matter of pushing a button
every few years, so it means organizations, picking your own candidates,
regularly recalling them and so on and so forth, nothing like that exists.
What exists is a kind of political class, closely connected to the economic
elites and leadership, selected among them. And the people are able
to ratify their choices but that's not democracy. In fact, in political
science it's called polyarchy, not democracy.
It's true to an
extreme extent in the United States but it's largely true in Europe,
not quite so much because of what you said before, Europe had popular
parties - labor-based parties, social-democratic parties and so on -
and that made some kind of difference. For example, the voting participation
in the US is far lower than in Europe and there have been extensive
studies on this, the most important of which was a long time ago, back
in 1980. Today it's even more extreme.
Walter Dean Burnham
- who is a political scientist, he did a kind of social economic analysis
of the nonvoters in the United States - and it turns out that their
profile is very similar to the voters in Europe who vote for the labor-based
or social-democratic parties. That option just isn't there in the United
States, so these people just don't vote. But it is less and less true
in Europe. Europe is kind of a drag-along of the American model - which
means moving away from democracy and toward polyarchy. In the United
States it was set up that way, so that's the way the Constitution was
framed and it kind of stayed that way, for all sorts of reasons. But
European countries have their own history, and it's clearly a drift
in that direction.
In fact, you know
better than I know, I don't like to talk about Europe, but my impression
is that Europe is moving in two directions. On the one hand it's moving
towards centralism and democracy deficit, on the other hand it's moving
toward regionalism, I think, in reaction. If you look around Europe
there's a lot more pressure for regional autonomy, revival of traditional
languages, of cultures, a degree of political autonomy and so on and
so forth. The place where it is most advanced is Spain. Spain is becoming
rather federalized, like Catalonia. Catalan has revived completely -
it's the language of Catalonia - Catalan practices have revived. I stayed
in the hotel in the town center of Barcelona a couple of years ago and
on Sunday, in the morning the people were streaming into the town square
in front of the Cathedral from all over the place, doing traditional
Catalan folk dances with Catalan music and things like that. The same
is happening in the Basque country, it's happening in Asturia, in Galicia,
and there is pressure to break up the quite artificial Spanish state
into more authentic regional areas. It's happening in England. In Wales
the local language is revived, kids on the street speak Welsh, there's
a Welsh national identity, it's happening to an extent in Scotland,
it's a little bit happening in France.
My own feeling is,
these are pretty healthy developments, they're, maybe, a counterweight
to the centralizing tendencies of the European Union and they may weaken
the clear democratic deficit that comes from a centralization that's
making power more remote from the population. It's not a bad idea. The
national state system is a very artificial and brutal system, and that's
why Europe was the most savage place in the world for centuries: Because
they tried to impose this crazy system, and most of the conflicts in
the rest of the world are residues of European attempts to impose it.
Breaking down this system could be a very healthy development.
Oldenburg: You often
point out that there is a basic moral principle you follow: "You
are responsible for the predictable consequences of your own actions,
you're not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody
else's actions." Does this imply that European activists should
focus more on what their own governments do and less on what the US
does globally?
That depends on
asking yourself: "What are the consequences of my involvement in
what the US does globally?" Actually, there are consequences, it's
not zero. Like, if Germany takes a position and German people in Germany
take a position on something, that indirectly influences US action.
So, you always have to evaluate. For example, for Germans to go out
on the streets and protest against the war in Iraq was highly significant,
that affects US policy.
But, it's the same
criterion, I mean, that criterion is not even debatable. If somebody
can't understand that, they should just shut up and say okay, I'm a
Nazi. Because that is just elementary in personal affairs, but what
that criterion implies is a complicated matter. It may imply that you
should pay more attention to the local problems of Oldenburg, it may
imply that you should worry about the World Trade Organization, the
US initiatives there. How the criterion applies to real cases you have
to figure out, but the criterion isn't debatable. The fact is that Germany
is not Rwanda, it has a huge impact on world affairs, so what is going
on in Germany can make a big difference. Take the issue you raised before,
about European independence. If Europe moves towards a more independent
role in the world, that could have a huge effect. Actually, Europe could
play a very effective role right now in settling the Israeli-Arab conflict.
It would have to break with the master. It would have to stop taking
orders from the master. European elites don't want to do this, but if
they were pressured to do it, they could intervene and mediate a solution
to the conflict outside of US control. And the same is true in plenty
of other areas.
Oldenburg: There is one question in this regard that is almost automatically
raised by the German and European left: How can you prevent your own
state, once it has a more independent role, from trying to play a new
imperial role? For example, I was at a rally where Palestinians raised
the idea that Germany should send troops to the Middle East. I had to
tell them this was absolutely absurd.
This is crazy. This
is absolutely absurd. But an international force is not a bad idea.
They'll never allow it in Israel, so you can forget about it, but in
the occupied territories, why not? An international force in the occupied
territories, monitoring total Israeli withdrawal, or the implementation
of something like the Geneva Accords. It makes perfect sense, it would
protect the Palestinians, it would protect them against Israeli attacks,
so why not? Obviously not Germany.
But how do you stop
unified Europe from playing an imperial role? By stopping it, that's
always gonna happen, you always expect it to happen. It's not an argument
against independence, it's like asking: "How do you deal with the
question that the post-apartheid regime in South Africa will impose
horrendous economic conditions?" It's not so simple. In fact, the
people are probably worse off now than most of them were before apartheid
ended. But, that's not an argument for keeping apartheid. It's just
saying, look, you make this small gain and you have the next mountain
to climb.
Oldenburg: I would
like to stick to that particular point. There's an upcoming conference
in Cologne against the wall in Palestine, where this is of interest.
What could the composition of such an international force be? I agree
that this is a reasonable idea, but the composition is of course an
important question.
Europe and Latin
America are the obvious choice. It can't be South-Asia, in this case.
It could be in some cases, but not in this case. Obviously, it can't
be the Arab states. Europe is a possibility. Latin America is far away
from it, it could contribute a force. There are problems because Latin
America is largely under US control. I mean, there's no perfect answer
but, something basically under the authority of the UN General Assembly,
so it is not controlled directly by the great powers.
I don't think much
of an international force is needed, frankly. If Israel would withdraw,
the problems are mostly solved. They'll not be totally solved, there're
still gonna be problems inside, and problems of ensuring that Israel
doesn't encroach. But, an international force can have an effect. The
very weak UN force in Southern Lebanon did have an effect, it didn't
make anything perfect but it did have an effect. For example, in the
1996 Israeli invasion Clinton had to call them off, after they, Israel,
started attacking the UN forces. They had no military force, a few people,
like the Fiji Islands. That was a difficult situation, and that was
kind of a buffer. It gave some protection to the population and that's
important.
This separation
wall is a total atrocity. What Europe could do right now is support
the people that are protesting it. I mean, there are people like Tanya
Reinhart who writes for ZNet, she is right out there now, in fact.
Oldenburg: There
is this conference in Cologne, and the Education Minister of the German
state of North-Rhine Westphalia was supposed to be introducing it and
he was called to the "Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland"
("Central Council of the Jews in Germany") together with his
whole cabinet. He was told that this would be a total atrocity and an
affront and it couldn't be done - and now it will not be done.
Germany is obviously
in a sensitive position. Israel and the Jewish community here obviously
use the Holocaust as a battering ram to prevent criticism of Israel
and they know Germany is particularly vulnerable. I mentioned to you
that they use it against Catholic universities in the US also. They're
using it in any way and it's totally disgraceful, I mean, the idea to
use the Holocaust to justify these things is beyond discussion. Germany
ought to resist that, but you can see that it's not going to be easy.
It should be dealt with. But, opposition to this wall ought to be universal.
There's opposition in the United States - so much opposition that, to
my amazement, the New York Times asked me to write a piece on it. That
never happens unless there's strong elite opposition. And there is.
I'm sure I that
the Times' editors are worried about how the lunatics are running the
asylum, or something like that. The wall is just crazy, or, if it's
not crazy that they're doing it, it's certainly a horrendous idea. It
has nothing to do with security, it's caging Palestinians into dungeons.
It's worse than in South Africa. Importantly, there is nonviolent resistance
going on but, of course, it's being smashed cause nobody is paying attention
to it. Putting that aside, German journalists could be there. Just taking
photographs - that takes away violence. They'll be arrested and deported
but that's okay too, they're not going to be killed.
Oldenburg: There
is a huge question hanging in the air and that's always brought up by
Palestinians I'm talking to: The question of the refugees, what to do
about them? How is it possible to get them involved as agents of their
own fate?
I must say, this
is an argument I've had with Palestinian friends for 35 years. Palestinians
can, if they want to, stand on principles and forget the consequences
for the victims - which is fine if you are in Europe and the United
States, if you're teaching at a university and you can have a seminar
where you stand on principles, but that's dooming the people to misery
and suffering. There is a real world, you can not pretend it is not
there because you don't like it. In the real world the refugees will
never return to Israel in more than a token return, I mean, that is
just a fact of life. There's no international support for it. If international
support ever developed, which is extremely unlikely, Israel would actually
refuse American orders. They would never permit it, they would turn
to nuclear weapons, if they had to, to stop it. They're not going to
accept giving up their own country anymore than people in Massachusetts
would accept to give their land to the people that were driven out.
There are just things that are not going to happen and we might as well
face it. It's not doing any favor to the refugees to dangle in front
of their eyes hopes that are never going to be realized. Things have
to be done to help them to come to terms with the reality of the world.
There may be token returns, they can certainly be given compensation.
If there'll ever be Palestinian independence, they can be returned to
Palestine, which is not where they come from, mostly. Or they have to
be given a chance to have their own choice to settle elsewhere, actually,
here is something which Europe could do easily. Bring them to Europe.
Most of them would probably rather be in Europe than in a savage refugee
camp. This would be a concrete step.
Actually, the US
ought to do it, cause it's mostly responsible for it. But I think we
probably can't manage that. But offering hope of return is just an insult
to them, in my opinion, and it's also blocking the hope for any political
settlement, cause there's no visible group in Israel - maybe five people
- who would agree allowing them to come back there. In fact, the demand
is a gift to the rightwing in Israel. It's an argument that the rightwing
can use, saying, look, the Palestinians want to drive us out, so, therefore
we just have to drive them out. This is essentially what the meaning
of it is. There's no point in pretending otherwise. I must say that
I've been having big arguments with my own Palestinian friends and Israeli
dissidents for about 35 years, and I haven't convinced them.
Oldenburg: This
is going on all the time and the interesting thing is that many of the
people who are bringing up this argument are from Europe and have a
safe distance.
There is a safe
distance. If you're sitting in a refugee camp or in the West Bank -
there, it is preserving settlements and offering more arguments for
building a wall and shooting them and so on.
Oldenburg: Could
you say something on the subject Latin America - since the implementation
of the Plan Colombia, since the Uribe Government came to power?
Since Plan Columbia
came in, atrocities have increased, the struggles were militarized,
the numbers of people who have been murdered have increased, the number
of Union activists murdered has increased sharply, in fact, Columbia
- I forget the numbers - has a large percentage of the worlds' union
activists murdered. The number of people who have been driven out of
their land has increased, more people are driven into the slums, I have
some figures about it in the Hegemony or Survival book. You're always
a year behind in statistics. Another effect is that it turned FARC into
just another paramilitary force, I mean, whatever FARC had been, it
did grow out of peasants' concerns and demands and had a kind of political
program that had some meaning - that all has gone. Now, it's just another
terrorist force preying on the peasants. So, it did succeed in militarizing
the conflict. Not very good for Columbians. I was down there in Southern
Columbia about a year ago.
They are just afraid
of talking about it, peasants who have been driven out of the land by
these chemical warfare programs. They are just as afraid of the FARC
as they are of the paramilitaries at this point.
Oldenburg: Can you
explain this in more detail?
The Columbia Plan
intensified the war and, in reaction to it, FARC became more of a military
force and dropped their social program. That is a pretty natural reaction
when you come under military attack. They did come under harsher military
attack. They were driven out of some of the areas that they controlled,
and they responded to it by becoming more of a militant terrorist force
and you could see the changes. By now, they barely have a social program,
I don't think the peasants and human rights activists that were kind
of sympathetic to them see them any longer as a social political force.
ELN, maybe, likely, but they are a pretty marginal group. There is now
an effort going on to integrate the paramilitaries into the society
which means to sort of formalize their role as enforcers. How that will
go, I don't know.
It's extremely hard
to say anything about public opinion in Columbia because they take polls,
but they are totally meaningless. The polls are mostly taken by telephone
- three quarters of the population never heard of a telephone. This
is one of the reasons why they were so surprised at the last election.
Even in Bogotá they got the predictions all wrong. That's kind
of what happened in India, they just don't know what most of the population
is thinking because they're kind of out of the wealthy system. It just
looks like an intensification of every ugly feature there. As for the
effects on cocaine production - which is irrelevant anyway - but, it
appears to have no effect. The way to measure the cocaine production
is to look at the price in New York and London: It is going down. I
just read in England when I was there a couple of days ago that cocaine
prices are at about the lowest level they have been in recent memory,
which means, the production is soaring. You drive it out one place and
then to somewhere else. But the whole idea of fighting drugs this way
is grotesque anyway. But even if you somehow accept it, it probably
has little or no effects. It does have the effect to drive peasants
off their lands. You drive them off the land, the mining company comes
in, they strip-mine the mountains, agro-business comes in, produces
export crops, the usual business.
The indigenous communities
and the peasants are resisting at various places - which is pretty amazing
- but without outside assistance they don't have a chance.
Oldenburg: Can you
estimate the role of the US in the coup d'état against Chavez
and the recent actions against him?
We don't know if
the US instigated the coup. I wouldn't be surprised but there's no direct
evidence. But they certainly supported it, that's very clear. They immediately
recognized the coup government. They had to back off because of the
Latin American reaction. Latin America was strongly opposed to recognizing
the coup, so, the US kind of backed off. But then the coup was thrown
out in a couple of days. That's not the end of the story. The Supreme
Court, which is the residue of the former regime, refused to allow the
government to try the coup leaders and amazingly, they agreed. So, they
didn't bring the coup leaders to trial. This didn't get reported cause
this doesn't fit in the image of the totalitarian Chavez government.
A couple of weeks later there was a terrorist bombing in Caracas, and
the investigation of it led back to two of the military officers who
had been participating in the coup. They fled the country to Florida
and asked for political asylum. Venezuela asked for them to be extradited,
to face charges - tells you how much they care about the war on terror.
That was in early March - I have never heard anything about it, as far
as I know, there was nothing in the media. That's very hard to find
out because nothing is reported.
Oldenburg: Justin
Podur wrote about it. He had an article about Columbia, combining it
with the situation in Venezuela, talking about the Columbian paramilitary
forces which were recently found in Venezuela...
We really don't
know. We have two sides saying different things. The Venezuelan government
claims are perfectly reasonable, but Columbia denies it and we don't
have independent evidence. We have no evidence, no investigators, it's
kind of guess work at this time. The whole region, from Venezuela to
Argentina, is out of control, from a US point of view. These things
are happening everywhere. That, they don't like and they really can't
do a lot about it. You can imagine what they are trying to do but the
US is in a fairly weak position. If they had won the war in Iraq easily,
as I rather suspected - I assumed they would, but they didn't, amazingly
- if they had succeeded in Iraq, my guess at the time was that the next
target was gonna be the Andean region. It is surrounded by military
forces, military bases, troops all over the place. It's extremely important
for the US. It's even an oil resource. Right now, I think, they're too
weak to carry it out. They may try subversion. I don't think the US
population would tolerate any military actions at this point, after
the Iraq fiasco.
They've got other
problems, take Argentina, they are refusing to take IMF orders and the
IMF can't really do anything about it. They can't really let the economy
collapse because US banks and lenders have too much invested there.
So, they sort of go along with the Argentinean refusal, they don't have
a lot of options. And Argentina is doing pretty well.
Oldenburg: A few
weeks ago some Argentinean people came to Hamburg, explaining to us
that the Kirchner Government is not as fine as it is portrayed in German
newspapers. They suppress the piqueteros and so on.
I'm sure that's
true, but they're also refusing IMF orders. Nobody expects them to be
a left government. They don't like piqueteros - for obvious reasons.
No central government likes independent action.