N Chomsky interviewed

[Pierre PICA]

Responsibility and War Guilt
A Culture-Setting Intelligentsia
Noam Chomsky interviewed by  Gabriel Matthew Schivone

The Responsibility of Intellectuals

GMS: Addressing a community of mostly students during a public forum at the
steps of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1969, you expressed:
"This particular community is a very relevant one to consider at a place
like MIT because, of course, you're all free to enter this community-in
fact, you're invited and encouraged to enter it. The community of technical
intelligentsia, and weapons designers, and counterinsurgency experts, and
pragmatic planners of an American empire is one that you have a great deal
of inducement to become associated with. The inducements, in fact, are very
real; their rewards in power, and affluence, and prestige and authority are
quite significant." Let's start off talking about the significance of these
inducements, on both a university and societal level. How crucial is it, in
your view, that students particularly consider and understand this, as you
describe, highly technocratic social order of the academic community and its
function in society, that is, comparably to the more directly associated
professional scholarship considering it?

CHOMSKY: How important it is, to an individual, depends on what that
individual's goals in life are. If the goals are to enrich yourself, gain
privilege, do technically interesting work-in brief, if the goals are
self-satisfaction-then these questions are of no particular relevance. If
you care about the consequences of your actions, what's happening in the
world, what the future will be like for your grandchildren and so on, then
they're very crucial. So, it's a question of what choices people make.
 

GMS: What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think
it's worth 'speaking truth' to the professional scholarship as well or
differently? Are there any short- or long-term possibilities here?

I'm always uneasy about the concept of "speaking truth," as if we somehow
know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our
elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We
can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to
do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by
coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack
of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.

As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice.

Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent
and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and
opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to
pursue them.


GMS: In your view, what is it about the privileges within university
education and academic scholarship which, as you assert in some of the
things you've written, correlate with them a greater responsibility for
catastrophic atrocities such as the Vietnam War or those in the Middle East
in which the United States is now involved?

Well, there are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity
confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you
have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial
opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do. I mean, that's
kind of elementary, I don't know how it can be discussed.

And the people who we call 'intellectuals' are just those who happen to have
substantial opportunity. They have privilege, they have resources, they have
training. In our society, they have a high degree of freedom-not a hundred
percent, but quite a lot-and that gives them a range of choices that they
can pursue with a fair degree of freedom, and that hence simply confers
responsibility for the predictable consequences of the choices they make.

 

The Rise of a Technical Intelligentsia


GMS: I think at this point it may do well for us to go over a bit the
beginnings and evolution of the ideological currents which now prevail
throughout modern social intellectual life in the U.S. Essentially, from
where may we trace the development of this strong coterie of technical
experts in the schools, and elsewhere, sometimes having been referred to as
a 'bought' or 'secular priesthood'?

Well, it really goes back to the latter-part of the nineteenth century, when
there was substantial discussion-not just in the United States but in
Europe, too-of what was then sometimes called 'a new class' of scientific
intellectuals. In that period of time there was a level of knowledge and
technical expertise accumulating that allowed a kind of managerial class of
educated, trained people to have a greater share in decision-making and
planning. It was thought that they were a new class displacing the
aristocracy, the owners, political leaders and so on, and they could have a
larger role-and of course they liked that idea.

Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In
industry it was called 'scientific management'. It developed in intellectual
life with a concept of what was called a 'responsible class' of
technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world's problems
rationally, and would have to be protected from the 'vulgar masses' who
might interfere with them. And it goes right up until the present.

Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of
technical intellectuals, it's a very attractive conception that, 'We are the
rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be
in our hands.' 

Actually, as I've pointed out in some of the things I've written, it's very
close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements
by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, it's strikingly similar. In
both cases there's a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know
the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and
have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them,
Walter Lippmann, called the 'meddlesome and ignorant outsiders' , namely,
the population, who just get in the way.

It's not an entirely new conception: it's just a new category of people. Two
hundred years ago you didn't have an easily identifiable class of technical
intellectuals, just generally educated people. But as scientific and
technical progress increased there were people who felt they can appropriate
it and become the proper managers of the society, in every domain. That, as
I said, goes from scientific management in industry, to social and political
control.

There are periods in history, for example, during the Kennedy years, when
these ideas really flourished. There were, as they called themselves, 'the
best and the brightest.' The 'smart guys' who could run everything if only
they were allowed to; who could do things scientifically without people
getting in their way.

It's a pretty constant strain, and understandable. And it underlies the fear
and dislike of democracy that runs through elite culture always, and very
dramatically right now. It often correlates closely with posturing about
love of democracy. As any reader of Orwell would expect, these two things
tend to correlate. The more you hate democracy, the more you talk about how
wonderful it is and how much you're dedicated to it. It's one of the clearer
expressions of the visceral fear and dislike of democracy, and of allowing,
again, going back to Lippmann, the 'ignorant and meddlesome outsiders' to
get in our way. They have to be distracted and marginalized somehow while we
can take care of the serious questions.

Now, that's the basic strain. And you find it all the time, but increasingly
in the modern period when, at least, claims to expertise become somewhat
more plausible. Whether they're authentic or not is, again, a different
question. But, the claims to expertise are very striking.  So, economists
tell you, 'We know how to run the economy'; the political scientists tell
you, 'We know how to run the world, and you keep out of it because you don't
have special knowledge and training.'

When you look at it, the claims tend to erode pretty quickly. It's not
quantum physics; there is, at least, a pretense, and sometimes, some
justification for the claims.  But what matters for human life is,
typically, well within the reach of the concerned person who is willing to
undertake some effort.


GMS: Given the, albeit, self-proclaimed notion that this new class is
entitled to decision-making, how close are they to actual policy, then?

My feeling is that they're nowhere near as powerful as they think they are.
So, when, say, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the technocratic elite
which is taking over the running of society-or when McNamara wrote about it,
or others-there's a lot of illusion there. Meaning, they can gain positions
of authority and decision-making when they act in the interests of those who
really own and run the society. You can have people that are just as
competent, or more competent, and who have conceptions of social and
economic order that run counter to, say, corporate power, and they're not
going to be in the planning sectors. So, to get into those planning sectors
you first of all have to conform to the interests of the real concentrations
of power. 

And, again, there are a lot of illusions about this-in the media, too. Tom
Wicker is a famous example, one of the 'left commentators' of the New York
Times. He would get very angry when critics would tell him he's conforming
to power interests and that he's keeping within the doctrinal framework of
the media, which goes back to their corporate structure and so on. And he
would answer, very angrily-and correctly-that nobody tells him what to say.
He writes anything he wants,-which is absolutely true. But if he wasn't
writing the things he did he wouldn't have a column in the New York Times.

That's the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive. People do not
want-or often are not able-to perceive that they are conforming to external
authority. They feel themselves to be very free-and indeed they are-as long
as they conform. But power lies elsewhere. That's as old as history in the
modern period. It's often very explicit.

Adam Smith, for example, discussing England, quite interestingly pointed out
that the merchants and manufacturers-the economic forces of his day-are the
'principal architects of policy', and they make sure that their own
interests are 'most peculiarly attended to', no matter how grievous the
effect on others, including the people in England. And that's a good
principle of statecraft, and social and economic planning, which runs pretty
much to the present. When you get people with management and decision-making
skills, they can enter into that system and they can make the actual
decisions-within a framework that's set within the real concentrations of
power. And now it's not the merchants and manufacturers of Adam Smith's day,
it's the multinational corporations, financial institutions, and so on. But,
stray too far beyond their concerns and you won't be the decision-maker.

It's not a mechanical phenomenon, but it's overwhelmingly true that the
people who make it to decision-making positions (that is, what they think of
as decision-making positions) are those who conform to the basic framework
of the people who fundamentally own and run the society. That's why you have
a certain choice of technocratic managers and not some other choice of
people equally or better capable of carrying out policies but have different
ideas.


GMS: What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an
individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself often in
positions of power or authority?

You almost never find anyone, whether it's in a weapons plant, or planning
agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, 'I'm
really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my
friends.'  Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: 'We're working for
the benefit of the people.' The corporate executive who is slaving for the
benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to
help everybody start their business; the political leader who's trying to
bring freedom and justice to the world-and they probably all believe it. I'm
not suggesting that they're lying. There's an array of routine
justifications for whatever you're doing. And it's easy to believe them.
It's very hard to look into the mirror and say, 'Yeah, that guy looking at
me is a vicious criminal.' It's much easier to say, 'That guy looking at me
is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things
because it's for the benefit of everyone.'

Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called
'the theologian of the establishment'. And the reason is because he
presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they
wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it's what
you do if you're an intellectual). But what it came down to is that, 'Even
if you try to do good, evil's going to come out of it; that's the paradox of
grace'. -And that's wonderful for war criminals. 'We try to do good but evil
necessarily comes out of it.' And it's influential. So, I don't think that
people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves
as benevolent. -Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them
what they're doing, they'll say: 'We're trying to preserve the peace of the
world.' People who are devising military strategies that are massacring
people, they'll say, 'Well, that's the cost you have to pay for freedom and
justice', and so on.

But, we don't take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from
enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They'll give you the same answers.
But, we don't take that seriously because they can know what they're doing
if they choose to. If they choose not to, that's their choice. If they
choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that's their choice. But it
doesn't change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well
with regard to others. It's very hard to apply the same reasoning to
ourselves. 

In fact, one of the-maybe the most-elementary of moral principles is that of
universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if
it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth
looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is
overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples
we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be
president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals
at Nuremberg, he'd be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It's
not even discussable. Because we don't apply to ourselves the principles we
apply to others.

There's a lot of talk about 'terror' and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our
terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it's
considered highly moral; it's considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their
terror against us, that's awful, and terrible, and so on.

But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just
enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means
accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself
and see how often that's accepted, either in personal or political life.
Very rarely.



Looking at Nuremberg and the Culture of Torture


GMS: What about criminal responsibility and intellectuals? Nuremberg is an
interesting precedent.

The Nuremberg case is a very interesting precedent. First of all, the
Nuremberg trials-of all the tribunals that have taken place, from then until
today-it is, I think, the most serious by far. But, nevertheless, it was
very seriously flawed. And it was recognized to be. When Telford Taylor, the
chief prosecutor, wrote about it, he recognized that it was flawed, and it
was so for a number of fundamental reasons. For one thing, the Nazi war
criminals were being tried for crimes that had not yet been declared to be
crimes. So, it was ex post facto. 'We're now declaring these things you did
to be crimes.' That is already questionable.

Secondly, the choice of what was considered a crime was based on a very
explicit criterion, namely, denial of the principle of universality. In
other words, something was called a crime at Nuremberg if they did it and we
didn't do it. 

So, for example, the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a
crime.  The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so on-those aren't crimes. Why?
Because we did them. So, therefore, it's not a crime. In fact, Nazi war
criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could
show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral
Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes,
called in the defense a high official in the British admiralty and, I think,
Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, 'Yeah, that's the
kind of thing we did.' And, therefore, they weren't sentenced for these
crimes. Doenitz was absolved. And that's the way it ran through. Now, that's
a very serious flaw. Nevertheless, of all the tribunals, that's the most
serious one.

When Chief Justice Jackson, chief counsel for the prosecution, spoke to the
tribunal and explained to them the importance of what they were doing, he
said, to paraphrase, that: 'We are handing these defendants a poisoned
chalice, and if we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same
punishments, otherwise this whole trial is a farce.' Well, you can look at
the history from then on, and we've sipped from the poisoned chalice many
times, but it's never been considered a crime. So, that means we are saying
that trial was a farce.

Interestingly, in Jackson's opening statement he claimed that the defense
did not wish to incriminate the whole German populace from whence the
defendants came, for the crimes they committed, but only the "planners and
designers" of those crimes, "the inciters and leaders without whose evil
architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the
violence and lawlessness.of this terrible war."

That's correct. And that's another principle which we flatly reject. So, at
Nuremberg, we weren't trying the people who threw Jews into crematoria; we
were trying the leaders. When we ever have a trial for crimes it's of some
low-level person-like a torturer from Abu Ghraib-not the people who were
setting up the framework from which they operate. And we certainly don't try
political leaders for the crime of aggression. That's out of the question.
The invasion of Iraq was about as clear-cut a case of aggression than you
can imagine. In fact, by the Nuremberg principles, if you read them
carefully, the U.S. war against Nicaragua was a crime of aggression for
which Ronald Reagan should have been tried. But, it's inconceivable; you
can't even mention it in the West. And the reason is our radical denial of
the most elementary moral truisms. We just flatly reject them. We don't even
think we reject them, and that's even worse than rejecting them outright.

I mean, if we were able to say to ourselves, 'Look, we are totally immoral,
we don't accept elementary moral principles,' that would be a kind of
respectable position in a certain way. But, when we sink to the level where
we cannot even perceive that we're violating elementary moral principles and
international law, that's pretty bad. But that's the nature of the
intellectual culture-not just in the United States-but in powerful societies
everywhere. 



GMS: You mentioned Doenitz escaping culpability for his crimes. Two who
didn't escape punishment and were among the most severely punished at
Nuremberg were Julius Streicher, an editor of a major newspaper, and-also an
interesting example-Dr. Wolfram Sievers of the Ahnenerbe Society's Institute
of Military Scientific Research, whose own crimes were traced back to the
University of Strasbourg. Not the typical people prosecuted for
international war crimes, it seems, given their civilian professions.

Yeah; and there's a justification for that, namely, those defendants could
understand what they were doing. They could understand the consequences of
the work that they were carrying out. But, of course, if we were to accept
this awful principle of universality, that would have a pretty long reach-to
journalists, university researchers, and so on.
 

GMS: Let me quote for you the mission statement of the Army Research Office.
This "premier extramural" research agency of the Army is grounded upon
"developing and exploiting innovative advances to insure the Nation's
technological superiority."  It executes this mission "through conduct of an
aggressive basic science research program on behalf of the Army so that
cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the general store of scientific
knowledge will be optimally used to develop and improve weapons systems that
establish land-force dominance."

This is a pentagon office, and they're doing their job. In our system, the
military is under civilian control. Civilians assign a certain task to the
military: their job is to obey, and carry the role out, otherwise you quit.
That's what it means to have a military under civilian control. So, you
can't really blame them for their mission statement. They're doing what
they're told to do by the civilian authorities. The civilian authorities are
the culpable ones. If we don't like those policies (and I don't, and you
don't), then we go back to those civilians who designed the framework and
gave the orders. 

You can, as the Nuremberg precedents indicated, be charged with obeying
illegal orders, but that's often a stretch. If a person is in a position of
military command, they are sworn, in fact, to obey civilian orders, even if
they don't like them. If you say they're really just criminal orders, then,
yes, they can reject them, and get into trouble and so on. But this is just
carrying out the function that they're ordered to carry out. So, we go
straight back to the civilian authority and then to the general intellectual
culture, which regards this as proper and legitimate. And now we're back to
universities, newspapers, the centers of the doctrinal system.


GMS: It's just the forthright honesty of the mission statement which is also
very striking, I think.

Well, it's like going to an armory and finding out they're making better
guns. That's what they're supposed to do. Their orders are, 'Make this gun
work better.', and so they're doing it. And, if they're honest, they'll say,
'Yeah, that's what we're doing; that's what the civilian authorities told us
to do.'

At some point, people have to ask, 'Do I want to make a better gun?' That's
where the Nuremberg issues arise. But, you really can't blame people very
severely for carrying out the orders that they're told to carry out when
there's nothing in the culture that tells them there's anything wrong with
it. I mean, you have to be kind of like a moral hero to perceive it, to
break out of the cultural framework and say, 'Look, what I'm doing is
wrong.' Like somebody who deserts from the army because they think the war
is wrong. That's not the place to assign guilt, I think. Just as at
Nuremberg. As I said, they didn't try the SS guards who threw people into
crematoria, at Nuremberg. They might have been tried elsewhere, but not at
Nuremberg. 


GMS: But, in this case, the results of the ARO's mission statement in
harvesting scholarly work for better weapons design, it's professors,
scholars, researchers, scientific designers, etc., who have these choices to
focus serious intellectual effort and to be so used for such ends, and who
aren't acting necessarily from direct orders but are acting more out of
freewill.

It's freewill, but don't forget that there's a general intellectual culture
that raises no objection to this.

Let's take the Iraq war. There's libraries of material arguing about the
war, debating it, asking 'What should we do?', this and that, and the other
thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that 'carrying out a
war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from
other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows'
(paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. -I mean, you can
find it. I've written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people
who have written about it in the world. But is it part of the intellectual
culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any
public discourse; anything that's part of the general exchange of knowledge
and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses
where they teach students that 'to carry out a war of aggression is the
supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows'?

So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is,
who's responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney,
Wolfowitz, Rice-they're responsible for sectarian warfare because they
carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil
that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can't. Because
our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody
we like.

And take Iran. Both political parties-and practically the whole press-accept
it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that 'all options are on the
table', presumably including nuclear weapons, to quote Hilary Clinton and
everyone else. 'All options are on the table' means we threaten war. Well,
there's something called the U.N. Charter, which outlaws 'the threat or use
of force' in international affairs. Does anybody care? Actually, I saw one
op-ed somewhere by Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist close to the government,
who pointed out that threats are serious violations of international law.
But that's so rare that when you find it it's like finding a diamond in a
pile of hay or something. It's not part of the culture. We're allowed to
threaten anyone we want-and to attack anyone we want. And, when a person
grows up and acts in a culture like that, they're culpable in a sense, but
the culpability is much broader.

I was just reading a couple days ago a review of a new book by Steven Miles,
a medical doctor and bioethicist, who ran through 35,000 pages of documents
he got from the Freedom of Information Act on the torture in Abu Ghraib. And
the question that concerned him is, 'What were the doctors doing during all
of this?' All through those torture sessions there were doctors, nurses,
behavioral scientists and others who were organizing them. What were they
doing when this torture was going on? Well, you go through the detailed
record and it turns out that they were designing and improving it. Just like
Nazi doctors.

Robert Jay Lifton did a big study on Nazi doctors. He points out in
connection with the Nazi doctors that, in a way, it's not those individual
doctors who had the final guilt, it was a culture and a society which
accepted torture and criminal activities as legitimate. The same is true
with the tortures at Abu Ghraib. I mean, just to focus on them as if they're
somehow terrible people is just a serious mistake. They're coming out of a
culture that regards this as legitimate. Maybe there are some excesses you
don't really do but torture in interrogation is considered legitimate.

There's a big debate now on, 'Who's an enemy combatant?'; a big technical
debate. Suppose we invade another country and we capture somebody who's
defending the country against our invasion: what do you mean to call them an
'enemy combatant'? If some country invaded the United States and let's say
you were captured throwing a rock at one of the soldiers, would it be
legitimate to send you to the equivalent of Guantanamo, and then have a
debate about whether you're a 'lawful' or 'unlawful' combatant? The whole
discussion is kind of, like, off in outer space somewhere. But, in a culture
which accepts that we own and rule the world, it's reasonable. But, also, we
should go back to the roots of the intellectual or moral culture, not just
to the individuals directly involved.


GMS: As you mentioned before, whether students are taught serious moral
principles: At my school, the University of Arizona, there are courses in
bioethics-required ones, in fact, to hard scientific undergraduates (I took
one, out of interest)- which mostly just discuss scenarios in terms of
'slippery slopes' and hypothetical questions within certain bounds, and
still none at all in the social sciences or humanities. Do you think there
should be? Would that be beneficial?

If they were honest, yes. If they're honest they'd be talking about what
we're talking about, and doing case studies. There's no point pontificating
about high minded principles. That's easy. Nazi doctors could do that, too.

Let's take a look at the cases and ask how the principles apply-to Vietnam;
to El Salvador; to Iraq; to Palestine-just run through the cases and see how
the principles apply to our own actions. That's what is of prime importance,
and what is least discussed.


GMS: As a note to end on, there seems to be some very serious aberrations
and defects in our society and our level of culture. How, in your view,
might they be corrected and a new level of culture be established, say, one
in which torture isn't accepted? (After all, slavery and child labor were
each accepted for a long period of time and now are not.)

Your examples give the answer to the question, the only answer that has ever
been known.  Slavery and child labor didn't become unacceptable by magic. It
took hard, dedicated, courageous work by lots of people. The same is true of
torture, which was once completely routine.

If I remember correctly, the renowned Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie
wrote somewhere that prisons began to proliferate in Norway in the early
19th century. They weren't much needed before, when the punishment for
robbery could be driving a stake through the hand of the accused. Now it's
perhaps the most civilized country on earth.

There has been a gradual codification of constraints against torture, and
they have had some effect, though only limited, even before the Bush
regression to savagery. Alfred McCoy's work reviews that ugly history.
Still, there is improvement, and there can be more if enough people are
willing to undertake the efforts that led to large-scale rejection of
slavery and child labor-still far from complete.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/parislinguists/attachments/20070817/d816879c/attachment.htm>