by DAVID BARSAMIAN
[from the April 24, 2000 issue]

Noam Chomsky is a longtime political activist, writer and professor of linguistics at MIT. His latest books are The Common Good and The New Military Humanism. He was interviewed for The Nation in late February by David Barsamian, director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado (www.alternativeradio.org). An edited version of that interview follows.

DB: Let's talk about what occurred in Seattle in late November/early December around the WTO ministerial meeting. What meaning do you derive from what happened there, and what are the lessons to be drawn?
Chomsky: I think it was a very significant event. It reflected a very broad opposition to the corporate-led globalization that's been imposed under primarily US leadership, but by the other major industrial countries, too. The participation was extremely broad and varied, including constituencies from the United States and internationally that have rarely interconnected in the past. That's the same kind of coalition of forces that blocked the Multilateral Agreement on Investment a year earlier and that strongly opposed other so-called agreements like NAFTA and the WTO.
One lesson from Seattle is that education and organizing over a long term, carefully done, can really pay off. Another is that a substantial part of the domestic and global population, I would guess probably a majority of those thinking about the issues, ranges from being disturbed by contemporary developments to being strongly opposed to them, primarily to the sharp attack on democratic rights, on the freedom to make your own decisions and on the general subordination of all concerns to the specific interests, to the primacy of maximizing profit and domination by a very small sector of the world's population.

Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, called the demonstrators at Seattle "a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates."
From his point of view that's probably correct. From the point of view of slave owners, people opposed to slavery probably looked that way. For the 1 percent of the population that he's thinking about and representing, the people who are opposing this are flat-earthers. Why should anyone oppose the developments that we've been describing?

Would it be fair to say that in the actions in the streets in Seattle, mixed in with the tear gas was also a whiff of democracy?
I would take it to be. A functioning democracy is not supposed to happen in the streets. It's supposed to happen in decision-making. This is a reflection of the undermining of democracy and the popular reaction to it, not for the first time. There's been a long struggle, over centuries, in fact, to try to extend the realm of democratic freedoms, and it's won plenty of victories. A lot of them have been won exactly this way, not by gifts but by confrontation and struggle. If the popular reaction in this case takes a really organized, constructive form, it can undermine and reverse the highly undemocratic thrust of the international economic arrangements that are being foisted on the world. And they are very undemocratic. Naturally one thinks about the attack on domestic sovereignty, but most of the world is much worse. Over half the population of the world literally does not have even theoretical control over their own national economic policies. They're in receivership. Their economic policies are run by bureaucrats in Washington as a result of the so-called debt crisis, which is an ideological construction, not an economic one. That's over half the population of the world lacking even minimal sovereignty.

Why do you say the debt crisis is an ideological construction?
There is a debt, but who owes it and who's responsible for it is an ideological question, not an economic question. For example, there's a capitalist principle that nobody wants to pay any attention to, of course, which says that if I borrow money from you, it's my responsibility to pay it back, and if you're the lender, it's your risk if I don't pay it back. But nobody even conceives of that possibility. Suppose we were to follow that. Take, say, Indonesia, for example. Right now its economy is crushed by the fact that the debt is something like 140 percent of GDP. You trace that debt back, it turns out that the borrowers were something like 100 to 200 people around the military dictatorship that we supported, and their cronies. The lenders were international banks. A lot of that debt has been by now socialized through the IMF, which means Northern taxpayers are responsible. What happened to the money? They enriched themselves. There was some capital export and some development. But the people who borrowed the money aren't held responsible for it. It's the people of Indonesia who have to pay it off. And that means living under crushing austerity programs, severe poverty and suffering. In fact, it's a hopeless task to pay off the debt that they didn't borrow. What about the lenders? The lenders are protected from risk. That's one of the main functions of the IMF, to provide free risk insurance to people who lend and invest in risky loans. That's why they get high yields, because there's a lot of risk. They don't have to take the risk, because it's socialized. It's transferred in various ways to Northern taxpayers through the IMF and other devices, like Brady bonds. The whole system is one in which the borrowers are released from the responsibility. That's transferred to the impoverished mass of the population in their own countries. And the lenders are protected from risk. These are ideological choices, not economic ones.
In fact, it even goes beyond that. There's a principle of international law that was devised by the United States over a hundred years ago when it "liberated" Cuba, which means it conquered Cuba to prevent it from liberating itself from Spain in 1898. At that time, when the United States took over, it canceled Cuba's debt to Spain on the quite reasonable grounds that the debt was invalid since it had been imposed on the people of Cuba without their consent, by force, under a power relationship. That principle was later recognized in international law, again under US initiative, as the principle of what's called "odious debt." Debt is not valid if it's essentially imposed by force. The Third World debt is odious debt. That's even been recognized by the US representative at the IMF, Karen Lissaker, an international economist, who pointed out a couple of years ago that if we were to apply the principles of odious debt, most of the Third World debt would simply disappear.

Newsweek had a cover story on December 13 called "The Battle of Seattle." It devoted some pages to the anti-WTO protests. There was a sidebar in one of the articles called "The New Anarchism." The five figures the sidebar mentioned as being somehow representative of this new anarchism included Rage Against the Machine and Chumbawamba. I don't suppose you know who they are.
I know. I'm not that far out of it.
They're rock bands. The list continues with the writer John Zerzan and Theodore Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber, and then MIT professor Noam Chomsky. How did you figure into that constellation? Did Newsweek contact you?
Sure. We had a long interview [chuckles].

You're pulling my leg.
You'd have to ask them. I can sort of conjure up something that might have been going on in their editorial offices, but your guess is as good as mine. The term "anarchist" has always had a very weird meaning in elite circles. For example, there was a headline in the Boston Globe today on a small article saying something like "Anarchists Plan Protests at IMF Meeting in April." Who are the anarchists who are planning the protest? Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, labor organizations and others. There will be some people around who will call themselves anarchists, whatever that means. But from the elite point of view, you want to focus on something that you can denounce in some fashion as irrational. That's the analogue to Thomas Friedman calling them flat-earthers.

Vivian Stromberg of Madre, the New York-based NGO, says there are lots of motions in the country but no movement.
I don't agree. For example, what happened in Seattle was certainly movement. Students have been arrested in protests over failure of universities to adopt strong antisweatshop conditions that many student organizations are proposing. There are lots of other things going on that look like movement to me. In many ways what happened in Montreal a few weeks ago [at the Biosafety Protocol meeting] is even more dramatic than Seattle.
It wasn't much discussed here, because the main protesters were European. The United States was joined by a couple of other countries that would also expect to profit from biotechnology exports. But primarily it was the United States against most of the world over the issue that's called the "precautionary principle." That means, is there a right for a country, for people, to say, I don't want to be a subject in some experiment you're carrying out? The United States is insisting on exactly that, internationally. In the negotiations in Montreal, the United States, which is the center of the big biotech industries, genetic engineering and so on, was demanding that the issue be determined under WTO rules. According to those rules, the experimental subjects have to provide scientific evidence that it's going to harm them, or else the transcendent value of corporate rights prevails. Europe and most of the rest of the world insisted [successfully] on the precautionary principle. That's a very clear indication of what's at stake: an attack on the rights of people to make their own decisions over things even as simple as whether you're going to be an experimental subject, let alone controlling your own resources or setting conditions on foreign investment or transferring your economy into the hands of foreign investment firms and banks. It's a major assault against popular sovereignty in favor of concentration of power in the hands of a kind of state-corporate nexus, a few mega-corporations and the few states that primarily cater to their interests. The issue in Montreal in many ways was sharper and clearer than it was in Seattle.

Do you think the food-safety issue might be one around which the left can reach a broader constituency?
I don't see it as a particularly left issue. In fact, left issues are just popular issues. If the left means anything, it means it's concerned with the needs, welfare and rights of the general population. So the left ought to be the overwhelming majority of the population, and in some respects I think it is. In that sense it could be a left issue that is a popular issue.
Talk more about the student antisweatshop movement. Is it different from earlier movements that you're familiar with?
It's different and similar. In some ways it's like the antiapartheid movement, except that in this case it's striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. It's another example of how different constituencies are working together. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee in New York and other groups within the labor movement. It's now become a significant student issue in many areas. Many student groups are pressing this very hard, so much so that the US government had to, in order to counter it, initiate a kind of code. They brought together labor and student leaders to form some kind of government-sponsored coalition, which many student groups are opposing because they think it doesn't go anywhere near far enough.
Students are not calling for a dismantling of the system of exploitation. Maybe they should be. What they're asking for is the kinds of labor rights that are theoretically guaranteed. If you look at the conventions of the International Labor Organization, the ILO, which is responsible for these things, they bar most of the practices, probably all of them, that the students are opposing. The United States does not adhere to those conventions. Last I looked, the United States had ratified very few of the ILO conventions. I think it had the worst record in the world outside of maybe Lithuania or El Salvador. Not that other countries live up to the conventions, but they have their name on them at least. The United States doesn't accept them on principle.

Tell me what's happening on your campus, at MIT. Is there any organizing around the sweatshop movement?
There are very active undergraduate social-justice groups doing things all the time, more so than in quite a few years. What accounts for it is the objective reality. It's the same feelings and understanding and perception that led people to the streets in Seattle. The United States is not suffering like the Third World. But although this is a period of reasonably good economic growth, most of the population is still left out. The international economic arrangements, the so-called free-trade agreements, are basically designed to maintain that.

Comment on an African proverb that perhaps intersects with what we're talking about: "The master's tools will never be used to dismantle the master's house."
If this is intended to mean, don't try to improve conditions for suffering people, I don't agree. It's true that centralized power, whether in a corporation or a government, is not going to willingly commit suicide. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't chip away at it, for many reasons. For one thing, it benefits suffering people. That's something that always should be done, no matter what broader considerations are. But even from the point of view of dismantling the master's house, if people can learn what power they have when they work together, and if they can see dramatically at just what point they're going to be stopped, by force, perhaps, that teaches very valuable lessons in how to go on. The alternative to that is to sit in academic seminars and talk about how awful the system is.

LET YOUR VOICE BE A LIVE AID

Use your voice and your influence to Make Poverty History in 2005!
This Christmas saw the release of Band Aid 20, involving pop stars across music genres such as Chris Martin, Sugababes, Will Young, Jamelia, Busted, Joss Stone and Bono from U2.
The re-recording of the 20 year-old hit sold more than 72,000 copies on its first day of release, making it the highest selling single in 2004. This proves that when we use our passions and talents in our spheres of influence to speak out about injustice and poverty, we can really impact one another.
Bob Geldof addresses crowds in Trafalgar Square, 3 February 2005.
Bob Geldof, founder of Band Aid, is one of many pop stars who is supporting the Make Poverty History campaign: 'This is about firing the starting pistol to the year of 2005 when Britain is the chair of the G8 and the president of the EU. The reality is that only politics created this dilemma and only politics can resolve it.'

Bono, who is also fully supporting the Make Poverty History campaign, said 'We can make extreme poverty history, I really believe that. The kind of stupid poverty where kids are dying for the lack of an immunisation that costs 20 cents, or for lack of food in a world of plenty. Don’t we want to be the generation that says no to that?'
Bono, Geldof and other musicians are using their spheres of influence to raise public awareness of three key issues which are perpetuating poverty: trade, aid and debt. By joining the Make Poverty History campaign, they are challenging the UK government, specifically the Prime Minister, to use his influence at key events this year to Make Poverty History.
The influence of our government
Tony Blair has the opportunity to influence other leaders of powerful nations such as the US, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy and Russia, who all have the power to end extreme poverty through the decisions they make as a group on trade, aid and debt.
Your influence
Every day you and I are hugely influenced by what we see on TV, read in the newspapers, pick up from the internet, learn from the Bible and talk about with one another. Our voices and opinions have influence, especially when we speak truth to one another.
Often the messages we receive from our surrounding culture day in and day out, are not true. When we stop to compare the words of our culture against God's word, they are completely different to one another.
This is especially evident when it comes to poverty. God hates poverty and He hates injustice. Proverbs 14:31 says 'He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honours God.' From God's perspective, when we ignore, oppress and perpetuate injustices against one another, we are actually treating God like that. We have all been made in his amazing image, and therefore to treat one another with less value than we would attribute to ourselves is wrong. This is big stuff and demands a response which is not a token gesture, but real.
In John 4:23, Jesus tells a Samaritan woman that God the Father is looking for people who will worship him in spirit and in truth. What does He mean? People who can sing in a holy way? No, people who have hearts that are sincere in their worship and pursuit of Him. People who will allow His Spirit to live in them and influence all areas of their lives. God wants us to let His Spirit influence how we treat one another and how we treat our world. It's easy to focus on our lives and not even notice the people who live next door, down the street, and in other countries. But thanks to TV and the internet we are transported into the lives of others and made aware of the injustices and poverty that others face.
God's challenge to us is to become true worshippers. This means speaking out in our spheres of influence to challenge poverty and injustice... are you up for it?
TAKE ACTION TODAY>>>

PRAY...

Aim
To maintain and increase the position of prayer in opposing social injustice within the Speak Network. For anyone with a heart for getting into powerful, intercessory prayer for our generation and for God's world. We want to change the way we pray, by getting closer to God to allow Him to change our hearts and make us effective intercessors. We want to show how prayer is the response for Christians to situations that break their hearts, and we want to witness to non-Christian activists with a heart for the same people, but who don't know God as the answer to the same problems.
Responsibilities
Support and organisation of prayer in campaigning on issues of social injustice.Responsible for creative/innovative prayer ideas to facilitate prayerful campaigning. Responsible for committing everything done on behalf of SPEAK to God in prayer.

SPEAK

The vision of SPEAK is to see a mass movement across the rising generation. We want to see this generation positioned and equipped to bring spiritual, social, economic, political and environmental transformation. We want to see God's Kingdom established in all its different facets. We want to see it in all our relationships, and in our lifestyle as a whole.
We believe that in order to do this we need to NETWORK and work in connecting and bringing people together with a similar heart. Networking means that are all connected and we can build unity in our actions and our prayers. In praying about situations of injustice and speaking out about the same things at the same time, we are able to make more noise.
Unity SPEAKs.
SPEAK is a NOT an organisation.
SPEAK is a network because we believe it takes all of us to recognise that we have a responsibility to those who are suffering as a result of global injustice. In the past we have spent long enough believing that an organisation will do it all for us, and that giving limited financial assistance to a charity is enough. However the problems are more deep rooted, and connected with unfair debt and unfair trade and many other issues. SPEAK is not another organisation existing to soothe our consciences. SPEAK exists to stir the conscience of everyone. It acts as a movement to stir people, especially the younger generation into action and see them released as a catalyst to motivate the church as a whole. It is not served up to you on a plate- it is up to you to take initiative.
SPEAK is an evolving ,dynamic movement of relationships. The relationships formed within the Network are constantly sparking off new initiatives within the Network. We believe that we are empowered and resourced in relationship with God and in relationship with each other, rather than just through an organisation.
It is difficult to box this movement, or to give a totally accurate neat description. It's about being a motivational catalyst in areas of Christian community. It's about lifestyle. It is about moving into action. It’s about getting things going, creating an infectious movement that seeks to change unfair power structures. It’s about following Jesus. It's about modelling something new, sharing our faith with people disillusioned by institutional models of church and Christian community. It is about reaching people who are searching spiritually.

How To Stop Terrorism
by John Dear

Like many, I was upset about the horrific terrorist attacks on London on July 7th. I spent a few days in London just this past Christmas. I know my way around the Tube. It gave me flashbacks of my days working at Ground Zero right after the September 11th attacks, and the thousands of grieving people I met in the months afterwards as a Red Cross coordinator of chaplains at the New York Family Assistance Center.
However, I am equally upset by the ongoing U.S. terrorist attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere. My heart breaks with every report of the hundreds of nameless people who die from our bombs, our weapons, our soldiers.
For me, then the question, “How to Stop Terrorism?” is easy. We stop terrorism first of all by stopping our own terrorism! We cannot fight terrorism by becoming terrorists. We cannot end terrorism by using the methods of terrorism to bomb and kill Iraqis, to occupy Iraq, to support the terrorist occupation of the Palestinians, and to hold the world hostage with our nuclear weapons. We must bring the troops home from Iraq, fund nonviolent democratic peacemakers in Iraq, send food and medicine to Iraq, support United Nations’ nonviolent peacemaking solutions, end world hunger immediately, cut all U.S. military aid everywhere, dismantle every one of our nuclear weapons, fund jobs, education and healthcare at home and abroad, clean up the environment and teach nonviolence to everyone around the world, beginning at home in every U.S. classroom.
As I watch the TV news reporters and commentators, I am amazed at their lack of understanding. Half the world considers the United States the leading terrorist in the world, by our public spokespeople remain clueless about what’s really going on. We are seen as terrorists by many around the world because we bombed and killed 100,000 people in Iraq in 2003, and because we have over 20,000 weapons of mass destruction, (many of them in my neighborhood in New Mexico), which we are willing to use on any nation that does not support “U.S. interests.” Our wars and bombing raids and hostility toward the world’s poor are turning the world against us. We are breeding thousands of new terrorists, desperate poor people who have nothing, whose backs are up against the wall, and who have learned from our total violence to adopt the lunacy of violence, even suicidal violence, to strike back, blow up trains and buses, and spend their lives spreading fear.
Violence in response to violence can only lead to further violence. Jesus taught us that as the soldiers were dragging him away to his death when he said, “Those who live by the sword, will die by the sword.” Gandhi taught us that when he said, “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.”
Violence cannot stop violence. We have to break the cycle of violence, renounce violence, start practicing creative active nonviolence on a level that the world has never seen, and reach out and embrace the world’s poor by meeting their every need. Then, we will win over the world, and no one will ever want to hurt a Westerner again. On that new day, we will sow the seeds of love and peace and discover what a world without terrorism, war, poverty, and fear is like.
I remember with sadness meeting thousands of Iraqis in 1999 when I led a group of Nobel Peace Prize winners to Baghdad. We asked everyone the simple question, “What do you want us to do?” Everyone we met, from the Papal Nuncio to the Muslim Iman to the non-governmental organization leaders (including the late, great Margaret Hassan) to hundreds of high school children to the hundreds of mothers holding their dying children, said: “Don’t kill us!” That sounds so obvious, but they said it with tears. If you want to help us, don’t kill us! If you want us to live in peace, don’t kill us! If you want us to be friends with you, don’t kill us! If you want Iraq to create a new democracy, don’t kill us! Send us food and medicine instead, and fund nonviolent, democratic movements for peace. Then, we will live in peace with you.
I reject violence and espouse only nonviolence, but I know that most Americans support, even relish violence, anything for “God and country,” they say. If people really believe in violence and justified warfare, then why should they be upset when individuals, or hundreds, or thousands, or maybe someday millions of people turn against the United States, England, or other first world nations in acts of terrorism? What do they expect when we have shown only hostility to the world’s poor, when we have practiced genocide against people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Darfur, Haiti, and elsewhere? Why are people who espouse violence--including most Americans, most TV commentators, most government officials, even most church people--so upset about these terrorist attacks, when they themselves support terrorism upon sisters and brothers elsewhere on the planet?
I do not understand our love of violence. If you want other people to be nonviolent, you first have to be nonviolent. If you want to remove the speck from someone else’s eye, you have to remove the two by four from your own head. If you want other nations to hold you in high regard, you first have to hold other nations in high regard, and treat every human being on the planet as a sister and brother. As someone once said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That is the answer to the nightmare of terrorism.
On August 6th, thousands of us across the country will remember that the United States vaporized 140,000 innocent, ordinary people sixty years ago in Hiroshima, Japan, in the ultimate terrorist attack. That morning, hundreds of us will converge on Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, and citing the book of Jonah, we will put on sackcloth and ashes, repent for the sin of war and nuclear weapons, and beg the God of peace for the disarmament of the world. That afternoon, I will fly to Las Vegas, to join over five hundred people of faith in a three day interfaith peace conference, where I will speak and then we will drive out to the Nevada Test Site, where hundreds of us will commit civil disobedience by walking onto the Test Site and getting arrested in a peaceful demand that they close this U.S. nuclear terrorist training camp. I hope everyone everywhere will stand up in protest against nuclear terrorism on August 6th.
How do we stop terrorism? Renounce every trace of violence in your heart and your life. Adopt the wisdom and practice of active nonviolence, as Gandhi and Dr. King taught. Beg the God of peace for the gift of peace. Join your local peace and justice group. Stand up publicly for an end to war. Let your life be disrupted, and take a new, nonviolent risk for disarmament. Create new cells of active nonviolence. Embrace the religious roots of nonviolence. Study and teach the wisdom of nonviolence. Resist your local military and government violence. Stop business as usual, government as usual, media as usual, war as usual and demand peace, justice, and disarmament for the whole world, now. Announce the vision of a new nonviolent world, a disarmed world, a world without war, poverty, injustice or nuclear weapons. Explain how such a world is possible if we give our lives for it, demand it, insist on it, work for it, and begin to live it.
Rev. John Dear is a Catholic peace, peace activist, and coordinator of Pax Christi New Mexico, a Catholic peace group. He is the author/editor of 20 books on peace and nonviolence, including two books just published from Doubleday, “Living Peace” and “The Questions of Jesus”. For information, see: www.johndear.org