SOURCE: “Noam Chomsky: An American Dissident,” in The Progressive, Vol. 51, No. 7, July, 1987, pp. 22-5.

[In the following interview, Chomsky discusses his political views, objection to the Vietnam War, alternatives to Western capitalist society, and the problem of public ignorance concerning politics and international affairs.]

Noam Chomsky, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is widely regarded as the world's foremost authority in the field of structural linguistics. Since the mid-1960s, he has also been one of America's leading political dissidents, particularly in his outspoken criticism of U.S. policy toward the Third World.

Chomsky's Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World was published last year by Claremont Research and Publications. Other recent books include Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (South End Press, 1985), and The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (South End Press, 1983).

Rejecting the clichés and easy assumptions of both Left and Right, Chomsky calls himself a libertarian and anarchist. “Ever since I've had any political awareness,” he says. “I've felt either alone or part of a tiny minority.”

[Peck]: How many of the books you wrote over the years have been reviewed in the major professional journals?

[Chomsky]: Well, in this country I don't recall offhand any case, ever. I suppose the reason is largely that this work is critical not only of the United States and U.S. policy but more crucially of the role of intellectuals in the United States. As a result, it's just beyond the pale. And when there are references, I think they are notable for their almost total lack of even a pretense of rational argument or concern for evidence.

The same is true pretty much of the media. My books on contemporary issues are generally reviewed quite widely in Canada, England, Australia, and elsewhere, but only sporadically here. I also find easy access to national TV and radio outside the United States, as well as journals. Though I've been highly critical of Israeli policy, I've been asked to write in the mainstream Israeli press. That is virtually unthinkable here.

Apart from the Soviet bloc, where I am under a total ban (including even linguistics), the United States is probably the country where I have least access to the media or journals of opinion. My experience in this respect is not at all unique; the same is true commonly for critics of U.S. policy and ideology.

When there is some reference to what I or other critics have said, it often seems that the commentators are barely aware of what the argument is, or what position is actually being formulated. I have found all sorts of strange illusions about what, say, my attitude was toward the Vietnam war, because elite intellectuals often simply cannot perceive that one could have the opinions that I do hold.

My attitude toward the American war in Vietnam was based on the principle that aggression is wrong, including the aggression of the United States against South Vietnam. There's only a small number of people in American academic circles who could even hear those words. They wouldn't know what I'm referring to when I talk about American aggression in South Vietnam. There is no such event in official history, though there clearly was in the real world. It seems difficult for elite intellectuals to believe that my opposition to the American attack against South Vietnam was based on the same principle that led me to oppose the Russian invasions of Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan.

There was a hope, at least in the 1960s, that people in the capitalist world could learn something from the Third World. Do you think that is so today?

I never thought the Third World liberation movements of the 1960s were likely to provide any useful lessons for Western socialists. They were confronted with all kinds of problems that we do not face, even apart from the problems of foreign attack and domestic national consolidation. We do not confront the problem of developing an industrial society under the onerous conditions that hold throughout most of the Third World. Honest libertarians should recognize these facts.

Take the Vietnam war. It was clear by the end of the 1960s that the United States had achieved its primary objectives. It had effectively destroyed the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the Pathet Lao in Laos, ensuring that only the harshest and most authoritarian elements in Indochina would survive, if any would. This was a major victory for U.S. aggression. Principled opponents of the U.S. war were therefore in the position of, in effect, helping to defend the only surviving resistance in Vietnam, which happened to be highly authoritarian state-socialist groups.

Now, I don't think that was a reason for not opposing the American war in Vietnam, but it was a reason why many anarchists could not throw themselves into that struggle with the energy and sympathy that they might have. Some did, but others were reluctant because they were highly critical of the regime that was to emerge, as I was. Within peace-movement groups, I tried to dissociate opposition to the American war from support for state socialism in Vietnam, but it was not easy to undertake serious opposition to imperial aggression, with the very real personal cost that this entailed, on such a basis.

In fact, the American movement tended to become quite pro-North Vietnamese—segments of it, at least. They felt they were not simply opposing the American war but defending the North Vietnamese vision of a future society.

I think there was the wish on the part of some to see a genuinely humane alternative society.

Yes. And many felt that this is what the North Vietnamese, the state-socialist bureaucrats, would create, which was highly unlikely, particularly as the war progressed with mounting terror and destruction.

The United States has never terminated its effort to win the war in Vietnam. It's still trying to win it, and in many ways it is winning. One of the ways it's winning is by imposing conditions which will bring out the repressive elements that were present in the Vietnamese communist movement.

American dissidents have to face the fact that they are living in a state with enormous power, used for murderous and destructive ends. What we do, the very acts we perform, will be exploited where possible for those ends. Honest people will have to fact the fact that they are morally responsible for the predictable human consequences of their acts. One of these acts is accurate criticism, accurate critical analysis of authoritarian state socialism in North Vietnam or in Cuba or in other countries that the United States is trying to undermine and subvert. The consequence of accurate critical analysis will be to buttress these efforts, contributing to suffering and oppression.

These dilemmas are hard to deal with. They are not unique to the United States. Should an honest Russian dissident, for example, publicly denounce the atrocities and oppressive character of the Afghan resistance, knowing that such accurate criticism will be exploited in support of Soviet aggression?

Suppose we could somehow manage to conduct this inquiry and discussion without contributing to the designs of imperialist power. For example, it's cheap and easy to say that these are repressive state-socialist societies. That's true. But then serious questions arise as to what one can do, say, in Indochina, in a society that has been so severely, almost lethally, damaged by destructive war and by a legacy of colonialism with horrifying effects, virtually unknown in the West.

Even apart from such colossal man-made disasters, what really are the prospects for development in Third World societies that are at a lower level of development today than were the industrializing societies of Europe and the United States in the Eighteenth Century? The industrializing societies of Europe and the United States were not faced with a hostile environment in which the major resources had already been preempted. These are really important things to think about. They raise the question whether development is even possible in the Third World.

You once wrote that if by some quirk of history the advanced Western powers should actually decide to genuinely give assistance to Third World countries, it wouldn't be all that easy to know what should be done or how to do it.

That's correct. These countries could become subsidiaries of Western capitalism. We have a good deal of experience with the consequences of that option. What other models of development are there? There's the authoritarian state-capitalist model of South Korea, or the authoritarian state-socialist model. Not very pretty, in many respects. But is there really a libertarian model of development that's meaningful? Maybe there is, but it requires some real work and thought to show that. It's not enough just to mouth slogans.

Intellectuals are often deeply involved with “traditions”—the “Marxist tradition.” the “Freudian tradition.” Is one of the aspects of the anarchist an uneasiness with any doctrine?

Well, anarchism isn't a doctrine. It's at most a historical tendency, a tendency of thought and action which has many different ways of developing and progressing and which, I would think, will continue as a permanent strand of human history.

Take the most optimistic assumptions: What we can expect is that in some new and better form of society in which certain oppressive structures have been overcome, we will simply discover new problems that haven't been obvious before. And the anarchists will then be revolutionaries trying to overcome these new kinds of oppression and unfairness and constraint that we weren't aware of before. Looking back over the past, that's pretty much what has happened.

Just take our own lifetimes: sexism, for example. Twenty years ago, it was not in the consciousness of most people as a form of oppression. Now it is a live issue which has reached a general level of consciousness and concern. The problems are still there, but at least they are on the agenda. And other will enter our awareness if the ones we now face are addressed.

What do you think of speaking in terms of a Marxist or Freudian tradition?

I think it's a bad idea. The whole concept of Marxist or Freudian or anything like that is very odd. These concepts belong to the history of organized religion. Any living person, no matter how gifted, will make some contributions intermingled with error and partial understanding. We try to understand and improve on their contributions and eliminate the errors. But how can you identify yourself as a Marxist, or a Freudian, or an X-ist, whoever X may be? That would be to treat the person as a God to be revered, not a human being whose contributions are to be assimilated and transcended. It's a crazy idea, a kind of idolatry.

And yet one to which many intellectuals have been drawn.

Well, because in subjects that really don't have a great deal of intellectual depth, that are not living intellectual disciplines that confront problems and try to overcome them, what you can do is accept the faith and repeat it.

I don't mean to suggest that this is a fair characterization of the work of those individuals who call themselves “Marxists” or “Freudians.” But the fact that such concepts persist and are taken seriously is a sign of the intellectual inadequacy of the traditions, and probably hampers their further development. We should not be worshiping at shrines, but learning what we can from people who had something serious to say, or who did something valuable in their lives, while trying to overcome the inevitable errors and flaws.

Are there any particular movements toward building alternative structures today within Western capitalist societies that you find hopeful?

It's a complicated matter. Take the moves toward workers' self-management that you can detect with a sufficiently powerful microscope in Europe, and sometimes here. On the one hand, these integrate the work force into the system. They might lead to class harmony, suppression of industrial strife, acceptance of lower wages and higher profits. In this sense, they serve as a device for socializing the work force within the existing system of oppression.

On the other hand, they also have the possibility of developing the awareness and understanding that it is perfectly possible for workers to manage without authoritarian structures; that bosses are not needed; that there's no God-given necessity to have hierarchical structure of authority in the work place of a kind that we would call fascist in the political domain. It can lead to that.

The question is, how do these tendencies play themselves out? From the point of view of the capitalists themselves or the managerial elite or the state management, of course, any such forms of worker participation would be used to the extent possible as a technique of subordinating the work force. And the question is, to what extent can self-conscious working-class groups struggle against this and try to turn these efforts into something else?

You have spoken—in some places you call it a “Cartesian common sense”—of the common-sense capacities of the people. What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like ours?

Well, let me give an example. When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday, and so on.

These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality which is beyond belief.

I think this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.

Now it seems to me that some intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used—would be used—under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge; I'm not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And, in fact, even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested.

To take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality—that's not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that almost all normal people have and can exercise. It just happens that they exercise them in analyzing what the New England Patriots ought to do next Sunday instead of questions that really matter for human life, their own included.

Are experts and intellectuals afraid of people who could apply the intelligence of sport to their own areas of competency in foreign affairs, social sciences, and so on?

I suspect this is rather common. Those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person lacking any special training who takes the trouble to learn something about them. Commentary on public affairs in the mainstream literature is often shallow and uninformed. Everyone who writes or speaks about these matters knows how much you can get away with as long as you keep close to received doctrine.

I'm sure just about everyone exploits these privileges. I know I do. When I refer to Nazi crimes or Soviet atrocities, for example, I know that I will not be called upon to back up what I say, but a detailed scholarly apparatus is necessary if I say anything critical of one of the Holy States—the United States or Israel. This freedom from the requirements of evidence or even rationality is quite a convenience, as any informed reader of the media and journals of opinion, or even much of the scholarly literature, will quickly discover. It makes life easy, and permits expression of a good deal of nonsense or ignorant bias with impunity, also sheer slander. Evidence is unnecessary, argument beside the point.

Thus, a standard charge against American dissidents or even American liberals is that they claim that the United States is the sole source of evil in the world, or other similar idiocies. The convention is that such charges are entirely legitimate when the target is someone who does not march in the appropriate parades, and they are therefore produced without even a pretense of evidence. Adherence to the party line confers the right to act in ways that would properly be regarded as scandalous on the part of any critic of received orthodoxies. Too much public awareness might lead to a demand that standards of integrity should be met, which would certainly save a lot of forests from destruction, and would send many a reputation tumbling.

The right to lie in the service of power is guarded with considerable vigor and passion. This becomes evident whenever anyone takes the trouble to demonstrate that charges against some official enemy are inaccurate or, sometimes, pure invention. Anyone who points out that some charge against Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, or some other official enemy is dubious or false will immediately be labeled an apologist for real or alleged crimes, a useful technique to ensure that rational standards will not be imposed.

The critic typically has little access to the media, and the personal consequences for the critic are sufficiently annoying to deter many from taking this course, particularly because some journals—The New Republic, for example—sink to the ultimate level of dishonesty and cowardice, regularly refusing even the right of response to slanders they publish. Hence the sacred right to lie is likely to be preserved without too serious a threat.

You have said that most intellectuals end up obfuscating reality. Do they understand the reality they are obfuscating? Do they understand the social processes they mystify?

Most people are not liars. They can't tolerate too much cognitive dissonance. I don't want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists; you can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don't think that's the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception.

I think there's also a selective process in the academic professions and journalism—that is, people who are independent-minded and cannot be trusted to be obedient don't make it, by and large. They're often filtered out along the way.

You've written that Henry Kissinger's memoirs “give the impression of a middle-level manager who has learned to conceal vacuity with pretentious verbiage.” You doubt that he has any subtle “conceptual framework” or global design. Why do such individuals gain such extraordinary reputations, given what you say about his actual abilities? What does this say about how our society operates?

Our society is not really based on public participation in decision-making in any significant sense. Rather, it is a system of elite decision and periodic public ratification. Certainly people would like to think there's somebody up there who knows what he's doing. Since we don't participate, we don't control, and we don't even think about questions of crucial importance, we hope somebody who has some competence is paying attention. Let's hope the ship has a captain, in other words. I think that's a factor.

But also, it is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues: They'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs.

In fact, power is very highly concentrated in small interpenetrating elites, ultimately based on ownership of the private economy in large measure, but also on related ideological and political and managerial elites. This means that you have to establish the pretense that the participants of that elite know what they are doing and have the kind of understanding and access to information that is denied the rest of us, so that we poor slobs ought to just watch, not interfere.

It's in this context that we can understand the Kissinger phenomenon. His ignorance and foolishness really are a phenomenon, but he did have a marvelous talent, namely of playing the role of the philosopher who understands profound things in ways that are beyond the capacity of the ordinary person. He played that role quite elegantly. That's one reason why I think he was so attractive to the people who actually have power. That's just the kind of person they need.