"Three, two, one, take two." "Good morning." "Welcome to Erin Mills town centre." "Home of the world's largest, permanent, point-of-purchase video wall installation." "My name is Kelvin Flook and I'm your video host all day here at EMTV." "I want to take this opportunity to extend a special and warm welcome to the film crew from Necessary Illusions." "We've got an excellent line-up of television programming today, so..." "let's get on with it." "So, how long have they been working on this documentary?" "Gosh, they've been working on it I don't know how long." "Every country I show up, they're always there." "They're in England, they're in Japan." "All over the place." "MILLER:" "Jesus." "CHOMSKY:" "They must have 500 hours of tape." "MILLER:" "Bet they put together a really doozy when they're done, huh?" "CHOMSKY:" "I can't imagine who's going to want to hear somebody talk for an hour." "But I guess they know what they're doing." "So, where are you all from?" "ALL:" "Florida." " Florida?" "ALL:" "Yeah, Gulf Coast." "You all talk like in chorus." "We're making a film about Noam Chomsky." "Does anybody know who Noam Chomsky is?" "ALL:" "No!" "(Whistle blows)" "MILLER:" "Good aternoon and welcome to Wyoming Talks." "My guest today is well-known intellectual Noam Chomsky." "Thank you for being on our programme today." "CHOMSKY:" "Very glad to be here." "I know probably the main purpose for your trip to Wyoming is to discuss thought control in a democratic society." "Now, all right, say I'm just Jane USA." "And I say, "Well, gee, this is a democratic society, what do you mean - thought control?"" ""I make up my own mind." "I create my own destiny"." "What would you say to her?" "Well, I would suggest that Jane take a close look at the way the media operate, the way the public relations industry operates." "The extensive thinking that's been going on for a long, long period, about the necessity for finding ways to marginalise and control the public in a democratic society." "But particularly to look at the evidence that's been accumulated, about the way the major media," "The agenda-setting media, I mean, the national press, and the television and so on, the way that they shape and control the kinds of opinions that appear." "The kinds of information that comes through, the sources to which they go." "I think Jane will find some very surprising things about the democratic system." "BAUSLAUGH:" "I'd like to welcome all of you to this lecture today." "Several years ago, Professor Chomsky was described in The New York Times Book Review as follows:" ""Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of this thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive."" "Professor Noam Chomsky." "(Audience applauds)" "I gather there are some people behind that blackness there." "But if I don't look you in the eye, it's because I don't see you, all I see is the blackness." "Perhaps I ought to begin by reporting something that's never read." "The line about "arguably the most important intellectual in the world," and so on comes from a publisher's blurb and you got to watch those." "If you go back to the original, you'll find that that sentence is actually there." "This is in The New York Times." "But the next sentence is," ""Since that's the case, how can he write such terrible things about American foreign policy?"" "They never quote that part." "If it wasn't for that second sentence, I'd begin to think that I'm doing something wrong." "And I'm not joking about that." "It's true that the Emperor doesn't have any clothes but he doesn't like to be told it." "The Emperor's lap dogs, like The New York Times, will not enjoy the experience if you do." "Good evening." "I'm Bill Moyers." "What's more dangerous:" "The big stick of the big lie?" "Governments have used both against their own people." "Tonight I'll be talking with a man who has been thinking about how we can see the developing lie." "He says that propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." "But he hasn't lost faith in the power of common people to speak up for the truth." "You have said that we live entangled in webs of endless deceit, that we live in a highly indoctrinated society, where elementary truths are easily buried." "Elementary truths such as..." "Such as the fact that we invaded South Vietnam." "Or that we're standing in the way of significant, and have for years, of significant moves towards arms negotiation." "Or the fact that the military system is to a substantial extent, not totally, but to a substantial extent, a mechanism by which the general population is compelled to provide a subsidy to high-technology industry." "Since they're not going to do it if you ask them to, you have to deceive them into doing it." "There are many truths like that." "We don't face them." "Do you believe in common sense?" "Absolutely." "I believe in Cartesian common sense." "I think people have the capacities to see through the deceit in which they're ensnared." "But you got to make the effort." "It seems a little incongruous to hear a man from the ivory tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar... a distinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with such appreciation." "I think scholarship, at least the field I work in, has the opposite consequences." "My own studies in language and human cognition demonstrate to me, at least, what remarkable creativity ordinary people have." "The very fact that people talk to one another just in a normal way, nothing particularly fancy, reflects deep-seated features of human creativity, which separate human beings from any other biological system we know." "TV:" "Tonight, scientists talk to the animals." "But are they talking back?" "(Chimp shrieks)" "The Journal with Barbara Frum and Mary Lou Finlay." "Communicating with animals is a serious scientific pursuit." "This is Nim Chimpsky." "Nim, jokingly named ater the great linguist Noam Chomsky, was the great hope of animal communication in the 1970s." "For four years Pettito and others coached him in sign language, but in the end they decided it was a lost cause." "Nim could ask for things, but not much more." "PETITO:" "I would have loved to have a conversation with Nim and understand how he looked at the universe." "He failed to communicate that information to me, and we gave him every opportunity." "STEINBERG:" "Noam Chomsky, theorist of language and political activist, has had an extraordinary career." "I can think of none like it in recent American history and few anywhere any time." "He has literally transformed the subject of linguistics." "He also has become one of the most consistent critics of power politics in all its protean guises." "Scholar and propagandist, his two careers apparently reinforce each other." "In 1957, he published his Syntactic Structures, which began what has frequently been called the Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics." "Like a latter-day Copernicus," "Chomsky proposed a radically new way of looking at the theory of grammar." "Chomsky worked out the formal rules of the universal grammar which had generated the specific rules of actual or natural languages." "The general approach I'm taking seems to me rather simple minded and unsophisticated, but, nevertheless, correct." "Later he came to argue that such systems are innate features of human beings." "They belong to the characteristics of the species and have been, in effect, programmed into the genetic equipment of the mind like the machine language in a computer." "One needn't be interested in this question." "Of course, I am interested in it." "The interesting question from this point of view is what is the nature of the initial state?" "That is, what is human nature in this respect?" "That in turn explains the astonishing." "Try the next one." "Fa-cki-li-ty" " Facility." " Facility." "STEINBERG:" "That in turn explains the astonishing facility children have in learning the rules of natural language, no matter how complicated, incredibly quickly, from what are imperfect and oten degenerate samples." " Compli..." " Complicated." "It's a complicated word." "Do you know what "complicated" means?" "It means it's complicated." "CHOMSKY:" "If in fact our minds were a blank slate and experience wrote on them, we would be very impoverished creatures indeed, so the obvious hypothesis is that our language is the result of the unfolding of a genetically determined programme." "Well, plainly there are different languages." "In fact, the apparent variation of languages is quite superficial." "It's certain - as certain as anything else is - that humans are not genetically programmed to learn one or another language." "So, you bring up a Japanese baby in Boston, and it'll speak Boston English." "You bring up my child in Japan, it'll speak Japanese." "And that means that..." "From that it fol..." "from that it simply follows by logic that the basic structure of the languages must be essentially the same." "Our task as scientists is to try to determine exactly what those fundamental principles are that cause the knowledge of language to unfold in the manner in which it does under particular circumstances." "Incidentally, I think there is no doubt the same must be true of other aspects of human intelligence, and systems of understanding and interpretation, and moral and aesthetic judgement, and so on." "STEINBERG:" "The implications of these views have washed over the fields of psychology, education, sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, and logic." "RÉE:" "In the '50s and '60s the bridge between your theoretical work and your political work seems to have been the attack on behaviourism, but now behaviourism is no longer an issue, or so it seems, so how does this leave the link between your linguistics and your politics?" "Well, I've always regarded the link..." "I've never... really perceived much of a link, to tell you the truth." "Again, I would be very pleased to be able to discover intellectually convincing connections between my own anarchist convictions on the one hand, and what I think I can demonstrate, or at least begin to see about the nature of human intelligence on the other." "But I simply can't find intellectually satisfying connections between those two domains." "I can discover some tenuous points of contact." "FOUCAULT (in French)" "If it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, or creative inquiry for for free creation without the arbitrary, limiting effects of coercive institutions," "then of course it will follow that a decent society should maximise the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realised." "Now, a federated, decentralised system of free associations incorporating economic as well as social institutions would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism, and it seems to me that it is the appropriate form of social organisation" "for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in a machine." "STEINBERG:" "Since the 1960s Noam Chomsky has been the voice of a very characteristic brand of rationalist libertarian socialism." "He's attacked the abuses of power wherever he saw them, he's made himself deeply unpopular by his criticism of American policy, the subservience of the intelligentsia, the degradation of Zionism, the distortions of media, and self-delusions of prevailing ideologies." "CHOMSKY:" "Under the liberal administration of the 1960s the club of academic intellectuals designed and implemented the Vietnam war, and other similar, though smaller, actions." "This particular community is a very relevant one to consider at a place like MIT because of course you're all free to enter into this community." "In fact, you're invited and encouraged to enter it." "The community of technical intelligentsia, and weapons designers, and counter-insurgency 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." "The rewards in power, and affluence, and prestige, and authority..." "Jamie?" "This came with the mail." "Be with you in a second." "Oh, God, they've still got their cameras." "OK?" "We'll start." "In your essay Language and Freedom, you write, "Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society"." "I was wondering what vision of a future society animates you?" "I have my own ideas as to what a future society should look like." "I've written about them." "I mean, I think that we should..." "At the most general level, we should be seeking out forms of authority and domination, and challenging their legitimacy." "Sometimes they are legitimate - that is, let's say they're needed for survival." "So, for example, I wouldn't suggest that during the Second World War... the forms of authority..." "We had a totalitarian society, basically." "I thought there was some justification for that under wartime conditions." "And there are other forms of..." "Relations between parents and children, for example, involve forms of coercion which are sometimes justifiable." "But any such..." "Any form of coercion and... control requires justification, and most of them are completely unjustifiable." "Now, at various stages of human civilisation it's been possible to challenge some of them, but not others." "Others are too deep-seated, or you don't see them, or whatever, so at any particular point you try to detect those forms of authority and domination" "which are subject to change, and which... do not have any legitimacy, in fact which oten strike at fundamental human rights, and your understanding of fundamental human nature and rights." "Well, what are the major things, say today?" "There are some that are being addressed in a way." "The feminist movement is addressing some." "The civil rights movement is addressing others." "The one major one that is not being seriously addressed is the one that's really at the core of the system of domination, and that's private control over resources." "And that means an attack on the fundamental structure of state capitalism." "I think that's in order." "That's not something far off in the future." "VOICEOVER:" "Your life work." "The alphabet has only 26 letters." "With these 26 magic symbols, however, millions of words are written every day." "Nowhere else are people so addicted to information and entertainment via the printed word." "Every day the world comes thumping on the American doorstep, and nothing that happens anywhere remains long a secret from the American newspaper reader." "It comes to us pretty casually, the daily paper, but behind its arrival on your doorstep is one ofjournalism's major stories." "How it got there." "There is a standard view about democratic societies, and the role of the media within them." "It's expressed for example by Supreme Court Justice Powell when he spoke of the crucial role of the media in effecting the societal purpose of the First Amendment, namely enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process." "That kind of formulation expresses the understanding that democracy requires free access to information, and ideas, and opinion, and the same conceptions hold not only with regard to the media, but with regard to educational institutions, publishing, the intellectual community generally." "NARRATOR:" "It is basic to the health of a democracy that no phase of government activity escape the scrutiny of the press." "Here reporters are assigned to stories fateful not only to our nation, but to all nations." ""Congress", says the First Amendment," ""shall pass no law abridging the freedom of the press"." "And the Chief Executive himself throws open the doors of the White House to journalists representing papers of all shades of political opinion." "But is worth bearing in mind that there is a contrary view, and in fact the contrary view is very widely held, and deeply rooted in our own civilisation." "It goes back to the origins of modern democracy, to the 17th-century English revolution which was a complicated affair like most popular revolutions." "There was a struggle between Parliament representing largely elements of the gentry and the merchants, and the Royalists representing other elite groups, and they fought it out." "But like many popular revolutions, there was also a lot of popular ferment going that was opposed to all of them." "There were popular movements that were questioning everything - the relations between master and servant, the right of authority altogether..." "All kinds of things were being questioned." "There was a lot of radical publishing - the printing presses had just come into existence - and this disturbed all the elites on both sides of the Civil War." "So as one historian pointed out at the time in 1660..." "He criticised the radical democrats, the ones who were calling for what we would call democracy, because..." "Now, underlying these doctrines which were very widely held is a certain conception of democracy." "It's a game for elites." "It's not for the ignorant masses who have to be marginalised, diverted and controlled of course, for their own good." "The same principles were upheld in the American colonies." "The dictum of the founding fathers of American democracy that:" ""People who own the country ought to govern it", quoting John Jay." "MAN:" "Fire!" "(Gunfire and screaming)" "(Military band plays)" "(Gunfire)" "Now, in modern times for elites, this contrary view about the intellectual life, and the media, and so on, this contrary view in fact is the standard one, I think, apart from rhetorical flourishes." "SIKOROVSKY:" "From Washington DC, he is intellectual, author and linguist" "Professor Noam Chomsky." "Manufacturing Consent - what is that title meant to describe?" "Well, the title is actually borrowed from a book by Walter Lippmann written back around 1921 in which he described what he called the manufacture of consent as a revolution in the practice of democracy." "What it amounts to is a technique of control, and he said this was useful and necessary because the common interests, the general concerns of all people, elude the public." "The public just isn't up to dealing with them, and they have to be the domain of what he called a specialized class." "Notice that that's the opposite of the standard view about democracy." "There's a version of this expressed by the highly respected moralist and theologian" "Reinhold Niebuhr who was very influential on contemporary policy makers." "His view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason but faith, and this naïve faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent over-simplifications which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course." "It's not the case, as the naïve might think, that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy." "Rather, as this whole line of thinkers observes, it's the essence of democracy." "The point is that in a military state, or a feudal state, or what we would nowadays call a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter what people think, because you've got a bludgeon over their head, and you can control what they do." "(Crowd chants)" "But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem - it may make people so curious and so arrogant" "that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule, and therefore you have to control what people think." "And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda." "Manufacture of consent." "The creation of necessary illusions." "Various ways of either marginalising the general public, or reducing them to apathy in some fashion." "(Applause)" "(Woman speaking Japanese)" "TRANSLATOR:" "The oldest of two boys," "Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1928." "As a Jewish child, the anti-Semitism of the time affected him." "Both parents taught Hebrew, and he became fascinated by literature, reading translations of French and Russian classics." "He also took an interest in a grammar book written by his father on Hebrew of the Middle Ages." "He recalls a childhood absorbed in reading curled up on the sofa, oten borrowing up to 12 books at once from the library." "He is married to Carol, and they have three children." "CHOMSKY:" "I don't like to impose on my wife and children a form of life that they certainly haven't selected for themselves, namely one of public exposure, exposure to the public media." "That's their choice, and I don't believe they themselves have selected this." "I don't impose it on them, and I would like to protect them from it, frankly." "The second sort of perhaps principled point is that I'm rather against the whole notion of developing public personalities who are treated as stars of one kind or another, where aspects of their personal life are supposed to have some significance." "Take one in the reception room." "WOMAN:" "You said you were just like us - you went to school, got good grades." "What made you start being critical, you know, and seeing the different..." "What started the change?" "Well, you know, there are all kinds of personal factors in anybody's life." "Don't forget I grew up in the Depression." "(Tyres squeal)" "(Crashing)" "My parents actually happened to have jobs, which was kind of unusual." "They were Hebrew school teachers, so lower middle class." "For them, everything revolved around being Jewish." "Hebrew, and Palestine in those days, and so on." "I grew up in that milieu, so I learned Hebrew, went to Hebrew school, became a Hebrew school teacher, went to Hebrew college, led youth groups, summer camp, Hebrew camps..." "The whole business." "The branch of Zionist movement that I was part of was all involved in socialist bi-nationalism, and Arab-Jewish cooperation, and all sorts of nice stuff." "(Whistle blows)" "BARSAMIAN:" "What did they think of you hopping on a train, going up to New York, and hanging out at anarchist book stores on Fourth Avenue, and talking to..." "CHOMSKY:" "They didn't mind, because..." "I don't want to totally trust my childhood memories, obviously, but the family was split up." "Like a lot of Jewish families, it went in all sorts of directions." "There were sectors that were super-Orthodox." "There were other sectors that were very radical, and very assimilated, and working-class intellectuals, and that's the sector that I naturally gravitated towards." "It was a very lively intellectual culture." "For one thing, it was a working-class culture, had working-class values." "Values of solidarity, socialist values, and so on." "There was a sense somehow things would get better." "An institutional structure was around, a method of fighting, of organising, of doing things which had some hope." "And I also had the advantage of having gone to an experimental progressive school, to a Deweyite school which was quite good, run by a university there, and you know, there was no such thing as competition." "There was no such thing as being a good student." "Literally, the concept of being a good student didn't even arise until I got to high school." "I went to the academic high school, and suddenly discovered I'm a good student." "I hated high school, because I had to do all the things you have to do to get into college." "But until then, it was kind of a free, pretty open system, and lots of other things as well." "Maybe I was just cantankerous." "As a historian, I have read with interest and amazement your long review article of Gabriel Jackson's Spanish Civil War." "It's a very respectable piece of history." "I appreciate how much work goes into it." "You know when I did that work?" "I did that work in the early 1940s when I was about 12 years old." "CHOMSKY:" "The first article I wrote was right ater the fall of Barcelona in the school paper, and it was a lament about the rise of Fascism in 1939." "I guess one of the people who was the biggest influence in my life was an uncle who had never gone past fourth grade, had a background in crime, and let-wing politics, and all sorts of things." "But he was a hunchback, and as a result he could get a newsstand in New York." "They had some programme for people with physical disabilities." "Some of you are from New York, I guess." "Well, you know the 72nd Street kiosk?" "WOMAN:" "Yes!" "CHOMSKY:" "That's where I got my political education." "At 72nd Street - where you come out of the subway, everybody goes towards 72nd Street." "There were two newsstands on that side which were doing fine, and there's two on the back." "Nobody comes out the back, and that's where his newsstand... (Laughter)" "But it was a very lively place." "He was a very bright guy." "It was the '30s." "There were a lot of émigrés." "A lot of people were hanging around there, and in the evenings especially it was sort of a literary-political salon." "There were, kind of, guys hanging around arguing and talking, and... as a kid, like 11, 12 years old, the biggest excitement was to work the newsstand." "You write in Manufacturing Consent that it's the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilise public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector." "What are those interests?" "Well, if you want to understand the way any society works, ours or any other, the first place to look is who makes..." "who is in a position to make the decisions that determine the way the society functions." "Societies differ, but in ours the major decisions over what happens in the society - decisions over investment, and production, and distribution and so on - are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates, and investment firms, and so on." "They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government, and they are the ones who own the media, and they are the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions." "They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens, you know, what's done in the society." "Within the economic system, by law and in principle, they dominate." "The control over resources, and the need to satisfy their interests imposes very sharp constraints on the political system and the ideological system." "When we talk about manufacturing of consent, whose consent is being manufactured?" "To start with, there are two different groups." "We can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation, there's two targets for propaganda." "One is what is sometimes called the political class." "There's maybe 20 per cent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate." "They'll play some kind of role in decision making." "They're supposed to sort of participate in social life, either as managers, or cultural managers, like, say, teachers, and writers, and so on." "They're supposed to vote." "They're supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on." "Now, their consent is crucial." "That's one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated." "Then there's maybe 80 per cent of the population whose main function is to follow orders, and not to think, you know." "Not to pay attention to anything, and they're the ones who usually pay the costs." "LINVILLE:" "All right, Professor Chomsky, Noam, you outlined a model - filters propaganda is sent through on its way to the public." "Will you briefly outline those?" "CHOMSKY:" "It's basically an institutional analysis of the major media, what we call a propaganda model." "We're talking primarily about the national media, those media that set a general agenda that others more or less adhere to, to the extent that they even pay much attention to national or international affairs." "Now, the elite media are the sort of agenda-setting media." "The New York Times, The Washington Post, the major television channels, and so on." "They set the general framework." "Local media more or less adapt to their structure." "(Phone rings)" "World news." "DIRECTOR:" "It's a sound bite, that says there's a beach head..." "I think 628 is a good one." "This is the operative sound bite for us." "Got a minute for all the times." "I love this sound bite." "CHOMSKY:" "And they do this in all sorts of ways, by..." "FLOOR DIRECTOR:" "Two and a half minutes to air." "45 seconds." "There is an unusual amount of attention today on the five nations of Central America." "NARRATOR:" "This is democracy's diary." "Here, for our instruction, are triumphs and disasters, the pattern of life's changing fabric." "Here is great journalism, a revelation of the past, a guide to the present, and a clue to the future." "(Growls)" "The New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United States, and one could argue, the most important newspaper in the world." "The New York Times plays an enormous role in shaping the perception of the current world on the part of the politically active, educated classes." "Also, The New York Times has a special role, and I believe its editors probably feel that they bear a heavy burden in the sense that The New York Times creates history." "NARRATOR:" "What happened years ago may have a bearing on what happens tomorrow." "Millions of clippings are preserved in the Times'library, all indexed for instant use." "A priceless archive of events, and the men who make them." "CHOMSKY:" "That is, history is what appears in The New York Times archives." "The place where people will go to find out what happened is The New York Times." "Therefore it's extremely important, if history is to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things do not, certain questions be asked, others be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion." "Now, in whose interests is history being so shaped?" "Well, I think that's not very difficult to answer." "MEYER:" "The process by which people make up their minds on this is a much more mysterious process than you would ever guess from reading Manufacturing Consent." "There is a saying about legislation, that legislation is like making sausage." "The less you know about how it's done, the better for your appetite." "The same is true of this business." "If you're in a conference in which decisions are being made on what to put on page one, or what not, you would get, I think, the impression that important decisions were being made in a flippant and frivolous way," "but in fact, given the pressures of time to try to get things out, you resort to a kind of a shorthand, and you have to fill that paper up every day." "It's curious in a kind of a mirror image way that" "Professor Chomsky is in total accord with Reed Irvine who at the right-wing end of the spectrum says exactly what Chomsky does about the insinuating influence of the press, of the big media as "agenda setters", to use one of the great buzz words of the time," "and, of course, Reed Irvine sees this as a let-wing conspiracy, of foisting liberal ideas in both domestic and foreign affairs on the American people." "But in both cases, I think that the premise really is an insult to the intelligence of the people who consume news." "Now, to eliminate confusion, all of this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative bias." "According to the propaganda model, both liberal and conservative wings of the media, whatever those terms are supposed to mean, fall within the same framework of assumptions." "In fact, if the system functions well, it ought to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to, because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought even more effectively." "In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal, and all these bad things, then how can I go beyond it?" "They're already so extreme in their opposition to power that to go beyond it would be to take off from the planet, so therefore it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct." "Can't go beyond them." "And a well-functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind." "The media would then serve to say, in effect:" "Thus far and no further." "We ask what would you expect of those media on just relatively uncontroversial, guided-free market assumptions?" "And when you look at them, you find a number of major factors entering into determining what their products are." "These are what we call the filters - so one of them, for example, is ownership." "Who owns them?" "CHOMSKY:" "The major agenda-setting media, ater all, what are they?" "As institutions in the society, what are they?" "Well, in the first place they are major corporations." "In fact, huge corporations." "Furthermore, they're integrated with, and sometimes owned by, even larger corporations, conglomerates, so, for example, by Westinghouse, GE and so on." "STUDENT:" "What I wanted to know was how specifically the elites control the media." "That's like asking, "How do the elites control General Motors"?" "Why isn't that a question?" "I mean, General Motors is an institution of the elites." "They don't have to control it." "They own it." "Except I guess, at a certain level I think..." "Like, I guess..." "I work with student press, so I know, like, reporters and stuff..." "Elites don't control the student press, but I'll tell you something - you try in the student press to do anything that breaks out of conventions, and you're going to have the whole business community around here down on your neck," "and the university's going to get threatened, and you know..." "Maybe nobody'll pay any attention to you." "That's possible." "If you get to the point where they don't stop paying attention to you, the pressures'll start coming." "Because there are people with power, there are people who own the country, and they're not going to let the country get out of control." "What do you think about that?" "This is the old cabal theory that somewhere there's a room with a baize-covered desk, and there are a bunch of capitalists sitting around pulling strings." "These rooms don't exist." "I hate to tell Noam Chomsky this." " You don't share that view?" " It's the most absolute rubbish I've ever heard." "It's the fashion in the universities." "It's patent nonsense, and I think it's nothing but a fashion." "It's a way that... intellectuals have of... of feeling like a clergy." "There has to be something wrong." "CHOMSKY:" "So, what we have in the first place is major corporations which are parts of even bigger conglomerates." "Now, like any other corporation, they..." "they have a product which they sell to a market." "The market is advertisers, that is, other businesses." "What keeps the media functioning is not the audience." "They make money from their advertisers, and remember, we're talking about the elite media, so they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates." "And ask your friends in the advertising industry." "That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience." "That raises advertising rates." "So what you have is institutions, corporations - big corporations - that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses." "CHOMSKY:" "Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this?" "Without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs, and the interests, and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers, and the product." "Now, there are many other factors that press in the same direction." "If people try to enter the system who don't have that point of view, they're likely to be excluded somewhere along the way." "Ater all, no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct." "That's not the way institutions function, so they all work to exclude, or marginalise, or eliminate dissenting voices, or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional." "They're dysfunctional to the institution itself." "Do you think you've escaped the ideological indoctrination of the media and society that you grew up in?" "Have I?" "Oten not." "I mean, when I look back, and think of the things that I haven't done that I should have done, it's... it's very... it's... not a pleasant experience." "BARSAMIAN:" "So, what's the story of young Noam in the school yard?" "Yeah, another..." "I mean, that was a personal thing for me." "I don't know why it should interest anyone else, but I do remember..." " You drew certain conclusions." " It had a big influence on me." "I remember when I was about six, I guess, first grade, there was the standard fat kid who everybody made fun of, and I remember in the school yard, he was on a... you know, standing right outside the school classroom," "and a bunch of kids outside sort of taunting him, and... you know, and so on, and one of the kids actually brought over his older brother from third grade instead of first grade." "Big kid." "And he was going to beat him up or something, and I remember going up to stand next to him, feeling somebody ought to... help him, and I did for a while, and then I got scared," "and I went away, and I was very much ashamed of it aterwards, and sort of felt, you know..." ""I'm not going to do that again."" "That's a feeling that's stuck with me - you should stick with the underdog." "And the shame remained." "I should have stayed there." "You were already established, you were a professor at MIT, you'd made a reputation, you had a terrific career ahead of you." "You decided to become a political activist." "Now, here is a classic case of somebody the institution does not seem to have filtered out." "I mean, you were a good boy up until then, were you?" "Or you'd always been a slight rebel?" "CHOMSKY:" "Pretty much." "I had been pretty much outside." "STEINBERG:" "You felt isolated and out of sympathy with the currents of American life, but a lot of people do that." "Suddenly, in 1964, you decide, "I have to do something about this"." "What made you do that?" "CHOMSKY:" "That was a very conscious, and a very uncomfortable, decision, because I knew what the consequences would be." "I was in a very favourable position." "I had the kind of work I liked, we had a lively, exciting department, the field was going well, personal life was fine," "I was living in a nice place, children growing up." "Everything looked perfect, and I knew I was giving it up, and at that time, remember, it was not just giving talks." "I became involved right away in resistance, and I expected to spend years in jail, and came very close to it." "In fact, my wife went back to graduate school in part as we assumed she would have to support the children." "These were the expectations." "And I recognised that if I returned to these interests which were the dominant interests of my own youth, life would become very uncomfortable." "Because I know that in the United States you don't get sent to psychiatric prison, and they don't send a death squad ater you and so on, but there are definite penalties for breaking the rules." "So these were real decisions, and it simply seemed at that point that it was just hopelessly immoral not to." "I'm Noam Chomsky, I'm on the faculty at MIT, and I've been getting more and more heavily involved in anti-war activities for the last few years." "Beginning with writing articles, and making speeches, speaking to congressmen and that sort of thing, and gradually getting involved more and more directly in resistance activities of various sorts." "I've come to the feeling myself that the most effective form of political action that is open to a responsible and concerned citizen at the moment is action that really involves direct resistance, refusal to take part in what I think are war crimes," "to raise the domestic cost of American aggression overseas through non-participation, and support for those who are refusing to take part, in particular, drat resistance throughout the country." "I think that we can see quite clearly some very, very serious defects and flaws in our society, our level of culture, our institutions which are going to have to be corrected by operating outside of the framework that is commonly accepted." "I think we're going to have to find new ways of political action." "(Commotion)" "(Whistle blows)" "I rejoice in your disposition to argue the Vietnam question, especially when I recognise what an act of self-control this must involve." "CHOMSKY:" "It really does." " You're doing very well." " You're doing very well." " I lose my temper." "Maybe not tonight." "Maybe not tonight... because if you would I'd smash you in the goddamn face." "That's a good reason for not losing your temper." "You say, "The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men."" "Including all of us." "Including myself." "That's the next sentence." "Oh, sure, sure, sure." "Because you count everybody in the company of the guilty." " I think that's true in this case." " It's a theological observation." "No, I don't think so." "If everybody's guilty of everything, then nobody's guilty of anything." "No, I don't believe that." "I think the point that I'm trying to make, and I think ought to be made, is that the real... at least to me - I say this elsewhere in the book - what seems to me a very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society and other societies" "is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events." "I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay that crops up." "These people would not be able to operate were it not for the... this apathy and equanimity, and therefore I think that it's in some sense the sane, and reasonable, and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt" "that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and more violent." "12 million pounds of confetti dropped into New York City's so-called Canyon of Heroes." "Americans were officially welcoming the troops home from the Persian Gulf war." "MAN:" "It worked out really great for us." "It just goes to show that we're a mighty nation, and we'll be there no matter what comes along." "It's the strongest country in the world, and you got to be glad to live here." "ASAIS:" "So, tell me what you feel about media coverage of the war." "It was good." "It got to be a bit much ater a while, but I guess it was good to know everything." "In Vietnam you didn't know a lot that was going on, but here you're pretty much up to the moment on everything, so..." "I guess it was good to be informed." "For the first time, because of technology, we have the ability to be live from many locations around the globe, and because of the format - an all-news network - we can spend whatever time is necessary to bring the viewer" "the complete context of that day's portion of the story." "And by context, I mean the institutional memory that is critical to understand why and how, and that's those who are analysts, and do commentary, and those who can explain." "MAN:" "Slug that last piece lTN-lsrael Post War." "TURNER:" "David Brinkley once said that you step in front of the camera, and you get out of news business, and into show business, but nonetheless that should not in any way subtract or obscure the need for the basic standards of good journalism." "PRODUCER:" "Hang tight." "Let me give you a lead for Salinger right now, OK?" "President Bush and Prime Minister Major have closed, or have almost rejected... the Soviet peace talk..." "peace efforts in Saudi Arabia." "The door is being let open." "Rick Salinger is standing by live in Riyad." " All but closed." " Yeah." "All but closed." "Right." "TURNER:" "Accuracy, speed, a fair approach, honesty and integrity within the reporter to try and bring the truth, whatever the truth may be." "Going to war is a serious business." "In a totalitarian society, the dictator just says, "We're going to war", and everybody marches." "NARRATOR:" "And with this weapon of human brotherhood in our hands we are seeing the war for men's minds not as a battle of truth against lies, but as a lasting alliance pledged in faith with all those millions driving forward" "to create the true new order- the world order of the people first, the people before all." "CHOMSKY:" "In a democratic society, the theory is, if the political leadership is committed to war they present reasons, and they've got a very heavy burden of proof to meet." "Because a war is a very catastrophic affair, as it's been proved to be." "Now, the role of the media at that point is to... is to present the relevant background." "For example, the possibilities of peaceful settlement, such as what they may be, have to be presented, and then to offer a forum... in fact encourage a forum of debate over this very dread decision to go to war, and in this case kill hundreds of thousands of people," "and leave two countries wrecked, and so on." "That never happened." "There was never..." "Well, you know, when I say never," "I mean 99.9 per cent of the discussion excluded the option of a peaceful settlement." "NARRATOR:" "To Washington's Office of War Information falls one of the most vital and constructive tasks of this war." "This is a people's war, and to win it, the people ought to know as much about it as they can." "This office will do its best to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, both at home and abroad." "NARRATOR:" "The first weapon in this worldwide strategy of proof is the great machine of information represented by the free press with its powers of moulding public thought, and leading public action, with all its lifelines for the exchange of new ideas" "between fighting nations spread across the earth." "CHOMSKY:" "Every time Bush would appear and say, "There will be no negotiations", there would be a hundred editorials the next day lauding him for going the last mile for diplomacy." "If he said, "You can't reward an aggressor", instead of cracking up in ridicule the way people did in civilised sectors of the world like the whole Third World, the media still..." ""man of fantastic principle", you know." "The invader of Panama, the only head of state who stands condemned for aggression in the world, the guy who was head of the CIA during the Timor aggression, he says, "Aggressors can't be rewarded", the media just applaud it." "VOICEOVER:" "The motion picture industry with its worldwide organisation of newsreel crews, invaluable for bringing into vivid focus the background drama and perspectives of the war." "Mobilised too in this all-out struggle for men's minds are the radio networks, with all their experience in the swift reporting of great occasions and events." "From every strategic centre and frontline stronghold their reporters are sending back the lessons of new tactics, new ways of war." "CHOMSKY:" "The result was it's a media war." "There's tremendous fakery all along the line." "The UN is finally living up to its mission." ""A wondrous sea change", The New York Times told us." "The only wondrous sea change was that for once the United States didn't veto a Security Council Resolution against aggression." "People don't want a war unless you have to have one, and would've known you don't have to have one." "The media kept people from knowing that, and that means we went to war very much in the manner of a totalitarian state, thanks to the media subservience." "That's the big story." "(Cheering)" "Now, remember I'm not talking about a small radio station in Laramie." "I'm talking about the national agenda-setting media." "If you run a radio news show in Laramie, chances are very strong that you pick up what was in The Times that morning, and you decide that's the news." "In fact, if you follow the AP wires, you find it in the aternoon." "They send across tomorrow's front page of The New York Times." "That's so that everybody knows what the news is." "The perceptions and perspectives and so on are sort of transmitted down, not to the precise detail, but the general picture is pretty much transmitted elsewhere." "The foreign news comes here to the Foreign News desk." "The editor is Bob Hanley." "Bob, I suppose you get far more foreign news than you can possibly use in the paper." "Yes, we do." "We get a great deal more than we can accommodate in a day." "Your job is to weed it out, I suppose." "This is the selection centre, as it were, and when I have selected it" "I pass it across the desk to one or the other of the sub-editors." "It comes back to me, and on this chart I design the page." "That is page one and page two." "Fine, Bob." "Thank you very much." "(Bell rings)" " Why do you want to make a film about Media?" "WINTONICK:" "Well..." "Such a nice, quiet town." "WINTONICK:" "It's a beautiful town." "We're making a film about the mass media, so we thought what a good place to come." "Want to know where they got the name?" "WINTONICK:" "Maybe you could start by introducing yourself." "Yes, I'm Bodhon Senkow." "I'm the main street manager and executive director of the Media Business Authority, and we are in Media, Delaware County, in the southeastern part of Pennsylvania." "Media is called "Everybody's hometown"." "The motto was developed as a way to promote the community." "We're a very high promotion-conscious community." "When you walk through Media, you'll be treated very well, and you find that people have taken the idea of being everybody's hometown to heart." "WINTONICK:" "The local paper, The Talk of the Town..." "The Town Talk." " Do you read that?" " Yes, I read The Town Talk." "What do you think the difference is between The Wall Street Journal and The Talk?" "Well, I mean, The Town Talk is completely local news, and it's fun, it's nice to read, it's interesting." "You read about your neighbours, see what's going on in the district, and things like that." "BERMAN:" "We're in business to make bucks, just like the big daily newspapers, and like the big radio stations, and we do quite well, and rightfully so, cos we work very hard at it." "I just wanna show you a copy of the paper here, the way it is this week." "It's plastic-wrapped on all four sides." "Weatherproof, and hung on everybody's front door." "And many times you'll find this paper runs well over 100 pages a week." "You have to remember there are five editions." "This happens to be the Central Delaware County edition, which is the edition that covers Media, Pennsylvania." "What you see here is the advertising and composition department." " Say hello, guys, will you?" "ALL:" "Hi." "And what we're doing now is we're putting red dots, green dots, and yellow dots up on the map wherever there is a store." "The red dots are the stores that don't advertise with us at all." "The green dots are the ones that advertise with us every week, and the yellow dots are the ones that run sporadically." "Now, we have computer print-outs of every one of these stores, and what we do is we take the print-outs of all the red dots which are the bad guys, and our idea is to turn these red dots into yellow dots, and turn the yellow dots into green dots," "and eventually make them all green dots, so 100 per cent of the stores and 100 per cent of the merchants and service people advertise in our paper every week." "That way, we won't have any more red dots." "I guess there'll always be a few, but I have high hopes there'll be a lot more green ones than red when we're finished." "Hi, I'm Jim Morgan." "I'm with the Corporate Relations Department of The New York Times, and I'm here to take you on a tour of The New York Times, so..." "let's begin." "MORGAN:" "So, they're just taking audio in here, yeah." "They're taking audio in here." "Audio." "No cameras, no still." "We went over this quite thoroughly." "They don't even take a still camera in here." "We're in the composing room." "This is where the pages are composed." "This is the typographical area." "This might seem big, but it is average." "In fact, below average." "Our 60 per cent might include on some days maybe... 20 pages of classified advertising all to itself, where the rest of the newspaper is weighted much heavier news to advertising, but the paper in its entirety every day, large or small," "is 60 ads, 40 news." "Well, that completes our tour of The New York Times, and I hope you found it informative, and I hope that you read The New York Times every day of your life from now on." "CHOMSKY:" "There are other media too whose basic social role is quite different." "It's diversion." "There's the real mass media, the kinds that are aimed at the guys who..." "Joe Six-pack." "That kind." "The purpose of those media is just to dull people's brains." "This is an over-simplification, but for the 80 per cent or whatever they are, the main thing for them is to divert them, to get them to watch National Football League, and to worry about the... you know... mother with child with six heads, or whatever you pick up in the... you know... in the thing that you pick up on the supermarket stands, and so on." "Or, you know, look at astrology, or get involved in fundamentalist stuff, or something." "Just get them away, you know." "Get them away from things that matter." "And for that, it's important to reduce their capacity to think." "NARRATOR:" "The sports section is handled in another special department." "The sports reporter must be a specialist in his knowledge of sports." "He gets his story right at the sporting event, and often sends it in to his paper play by play." "CHOMSKY:" "Sports." "That's another crucial example of the indoctrination system in my view." "For one thing, because it... you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance." " That keeps them from worrying about..." "(Applause) ...keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives they might have some idea about doing something about." "And in fact, it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in sports." "You listen to radio stations where people call in." "They have the most exotic information and understanding about all kinds of arcane issues, and the press undoubtedly does a lot with this." "I remember in high school" " I was pretty old " "I suddenly asked myself at one point," ""Why do I care if my high school team wins the football game?"" "I mean, I don't know anybody on the team, you know." "(Laughter)" "It had nothing to do with me." "I mean, why am I cheering for my team?" "It doesn't make any sense." "But the point is, it does make sense." "It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and, you know, group cohesion behind..." "you know, leadership elements." "In fact, it's training in irrational jingoism." "That's also a feature of competitive sports." "I think..." "If you look closely at these things, I think, typically, they do have functions, and that's why energy is devoted to supporting them, and creating a basis for them, and advertisers are willing to pay for them." "WINTONICK:" "I'd like to ask you a question about the methodology and study in the propaganda model, and how would one go about doing that?" "Well, there are a number of ways to proceed." "One obvious way is to try to find more or less paired examples." "History doesn't offer true controlled experiments, but it oten comes pretty close." "So one can find atrocities or abuses of one sort that on the one hand are committed by official enemies, and on the other hand are committed by friends and allies, or by the favoured state itself." "By the United States, in the US' case." "The question is whether the media accept the government framework, or whether they use the same agenda, same set of questions, the same criteria for dealing with the two cases as any honest outside observer would do." "ANNOUNCER:" "If you think America's involvement in the war in Southeast Asia is over, think again." "MAN:" "The Khmer Rouge are the most genocidal people on the face of the earth." "Peter Jennings Reporting From The Killing Fields." "Thursday." "I mean, the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot." "1975 to... through 1978." "That atrocity..." "I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury, and so on and so forth, so that's one atrocity." "It just happens that in that case, history did set up a controlled experiment." "ASAIS:" "Ever heard of a place called East Timor?" " I can't say that I have." " Where?" " East Timor." " No." "Well, it happens that right at that time there was another atrocity." "Very similar in character, but differing in one respect - we were responsible for it, not Pol Pot." "Hello." "I'm Louise Penney, and this is Radio Noon." "If you've been listening to the programme fairly regularly over the last few months, you'll know East Timor has come into the conversation more than once, particularly when we were talking about foreign aid, and also the war, and a new world order." "People wondered why, if the UN was serious about a new world order, no-one was doing anything to help East Timor." "The area was invaded by Indonesia in 1975." "There are reports of atrocities against the Timorese people, and yet Canada and other nations have consistently voted against UN Resolutions to end the occupation." "Today, we're going to take a closer look at East Timor, what's happened to it, and why the international community is doing nothing to help." "One of the people who have been most active is Elaine Briére, a photojournalist from British Columbia." "She's the founder of the East Timor Alert Network, and she joins me in the studio now." " Hello." " Hi." "One tragedy compounding a tragedy is that a lot of people don't know much about East Timor." " Where is it?" " East Timor is just north of Australia." "About 420 km, and it's right between the Indian and Pacific oceans." "Just south of East Timor is a deep-water sea lane perfect for US submarines to pass through." "There's also huge oil reserves there." "One of the unique things about East Timor is that it's truly one of the last surviving ancient civilisations in that part of the world." "The Timorese spoke 30 different languages and dialects amongst a group of 700,000 people." "Today less than five per cent of the world's people live like the East Timorese." "Basically self-reliant, they live really outside of the global economic system." "Small societies like the East Timorese are much more democratic and much more egalitarian, and there's much more sharing of power and wealth." "Before the Indonesians invaded, most people lived in small rural villages." "The old people in the village were like the university." "They passed on tribal wisdom from generation to generation." "Children grew up in a safe, stimulating, nurturing environment." "A year ater I let East Timor, I was appalled when I heard Indonesia had invaded." "It didn't want a small, independent country setting an example for the region." "CHOMSKY:" "East Timor was a Portuguese colony." "Indonesia had no claim to it, and in fact stated that they had no claim to it." "During the period of colonisation, there was a good deal of politicisation that different groups developed." "A civil war broke out in August '75." "(Machine-gun fire)" "It ended up in a victory for Fretilin, which was one of the groupings, described as populist Catholic in character, with some typical letist rhetoric." "(Car horn beeps)" "Indonesia at once started intervening." "SHACKLETON:" "What's the situation?" "When did those ships come in?" "RAMOS-HORTA:" "They start arriving since Monday." "Six, seven boats together, very close to our border." "They're not there just for fun." "They're preparing a massive operation." "SHACKLETON:" "Something happened here last night that moved us very deeply." "It was so far outside our experience as Australians that we'll find it very difficult to convey to you, but we'll try." "Sitting on woven mats under a thatched roof in a hut with no walls we were the target of a barrage of questioning from men who know they may die tomorrow, and cannot understand why the rest of the world does not care." "That's all they want - for the United Nations to care about what is happening here." "The emotion here last night was so strong that we, all three of us, felt we should be able to reach out into the warm night air and touch it." "Greg Shackleton, at an unnamed village which we will remember forever in Portuguese Timor." "(Gun cocked and fired)" "(Continued gunfire)" "Ford and Kissinger visited Jakarta, I think it was December 5th." "We know that they had requested that Indonesia delay the invasion until ater they let because it would be too embarrassing." "And within hours, I think, ater they let, the invasion took place on December 7th." "What happened on December 7th in 1975, is just one of the great evil deeds of history." "Early in the morning bombs begin dropping on Dili." "The number of troops that invaded Dili that day almost outnumbered the entire population of the town." "And for two or three weeks, they just killed people." "(Speaks Portuguese)" "This Council must consider Indonesian aggression against East Timor as the main issue of the discussion." "CHOMSKY:" "When the Indonesians invaded, the UN reacted as it always does, calling for sanctions and condemnation and so on." "Various watered-down resolutions were passed, but the US were very clearly not going to allow anything to work." "So the Timorese were fleeing into the jungles by the thousands." "By late 1977, '78 Indonesia set up receiving centres for those Timorese who came out of the jungle waving white flags." "Those the Indonesians thought more educated, or suspected of belonging to Fretilin or other opposition parties were immediately killed." "They took women aside, and flew them off to Dili in helicopters for use by the Indonesian soldiers." "They killed children and babies." "But in those days their main strategy and their main weapon was starvation." "CHOMSKY:" "By 1978, it was approaching really genocidal levels." "The church and other sources estimated about 200,000 people killed." "The US backed it all the way." "The US provided 90 per cent of the arms." "Right ater the invasion, arms shipments were stepped up." "When the Indonesians actually began to run out of arms in 1978, the Carter administration moved in and increased arms sales, and other western countries did the same." "Canada, England..." "Holland..." "Everybody who could make a buck was in there, trying to make sure they could kill more Timorese." "There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them." "Nothing could show it more clearly than this case." "It wasn't that nobody had heard of East Timor." "Remember there was plenty of coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere before the invasion." "The reason was there was concern over the break-up of the Portuguese empire and what that would mean." "There was fear it would lead to independence, or Russian influence, or whatever." "Ater the Indonesians invaded, the coverage dropped." "There was some, but it was strictly from the point of view of the State Department and Indonesian generals." "Never a Timorese refugee." "As the atrocities reached their maximum peak in 1978, when it really was becoming genocidal, coverage dropped to zero in the United States and Canada, the two countries I've looked at closely." "Literally dropped to zero." "All this was going on at exactly the same time as the great protest of outrage over Cambodia." "The level of atrocities was comparable." "In relative terms it was probably considerably higher in Timor." "It turns out that right in Cambodia in the preceding years, 1970 through 1975, there was also a comparable atrocity for which we were responsible." "The major US attack against Cambodia started with the bombings of the early 1970s." "They reached a peak in 1973, and they continued up till 1975." "They were directed against inner Cambodia." "Very little is known about them, because the media wanted it to be secret." "They knew it was going on." "They just didn't want to know what was happening." "The CIA estimates about 600,000 killed during that five-year period, which is mostly either US bombing, or a US-sponsored war." "So that's pretty significant killing." "Also, the conditions in which it let Cambodia were such that high US officials predicted that about a million people would die in the atermath just from hunger and disease because of the wreckage of the country." "Pretty good evidence from US government and scholarly sources that the intense bombardment was a significant force - maybe a critical force - in building up peasant support for the Khmer Rouge who were a pretty marginal element." "Well, that's just the wrong story." "Ater 1975, atrocities continued, and that became the right story - now they're being carried out by the bad guys." "Well, it was bad enough." "In fact, current estimates are... well, they vary." "The CIA claim 50,000 to 100,000 people killed, and maybe another million or so who died one way or another." "Michael Vickery is the one person who's given a really close, detailed analysis." "His figure is maybe 750,000 deaths above the normal." "Others like Ben Kiernan suggest higher figures, but so far without a detailed analysis." "Anyway, it was terrible." "No doubt about it." "Although the atrocities - the real atrocities - were bad enough, they weren't quite good enough for the purposes needed." "Within a few weeks ater the Khmer Rouge takeover," "The New York Times was already accusing them of genocide." "At that point, maybe a couple of hundred or a few thousand people had been killed." "And from then on, it was a drum beat, a chorus of genocide." "The big bestseller on Cambodia and Pol Pot is called Murder of a Gentle Land." "Up until April 17th, 1975, it was a gentle land of peaceful, smiling people, and ater that some horrible holocaust took place." "Very quickly, a figure of two million killed was hit upon." "In fact, what was claimed was that the Khmer Rouge boast of having murdered two million people." "Facts are very dramatic." "In the case of atrocities committed by the official enemy, extraordinary show of outrage, exaggeration, no evidence required." "Faked photographs are fine, anything goes." "Also a vast amount of lying." "I mean, an amount of lying that would have made Stalin cringe." "It was fraudulent, and we know that it was fraudulent by looking at the response to comparable atrocities for which the United States was responsible." "Early '70s Cambodia, and Timor too - very closely paired examples." "Well, the media response was quite dramatic." "(Typewriter ribbon being turned)" "(Typing)" "(Typewriter pings)" "(Ribbon turns)" "(Typing)" "MEYER:" "Back in 1980," "MEYER:" "Back in 1980, I taught a course at Tuts University." "Well, Chomsky came around to this class, and he made a very powerful case that the press underplayed the fact that the Indonesian government annexed this former Portuguese colony in 1975, and that if you compare it for example with Cambodia where there was acreage of things," "this was a communist atrocity, whereas the other was not a communist atrocity." "Well, I got quite interested in this, and I went to talk to the then deputy foreign editor of The Times, and I said, "You know, we've had very poor coverage on this"." "He said, "You're right." "There are a dozen atrocities around the world we don't cover." "This is one for various reasons", so I took it up." "I was working as a reporter and writer for a small alternative radio programme in upstate New York, and we received audio tapes of interviews with Timorese leaders, and we were quite surprised that given the level of American involvement" "that there was not more coverage, indeed practically any coverage, of the large-scale Indonesian killing in the mainstream American media." "We formed a small group of people to try to monitor the situation and see what we could do over time to alert public opinion to what was actually happening in East Timor." "There were literally about half a dozen people who simply dedicated themselves with great commitment to getting this story to break through." "And they reached a couple of people in Congress." "They got to me, for example." "I was able to testify at the UN and write some things." "They kept at it, kept at it, kept at it." "Whatever is known about the subject mainly... essentially comes from their work." "There's not much else." "I wrote first an editorial called An Unjust War in East Timor." "It had a map, and it said exactly what had happened." "We then ran a dozen other editorials on it." "They were read, entered in the Congressional Record, several Congressmen took up the cause, and something was done in Congress as a result." "KOHEN:" "The fact the editorial page of The New York Times on Christmas Eve published that editorial put our work on a very different level, and it gave a great deal of legitimacy to something that we were trying to... advance for a long time, and that was the idea and the reality" "that a major tragedy was unfolding in East Timor." "If one takes literally various... theories that Professor Chomsky puts out, one would feel that there is a tacit conspiracy between the establishment press and the government in Washington to focus on certain things, and ignore certain things." "So that if we broke the rules that we would instantly get a reaction, a sharp reaction from the overlords in Washington who would say, "Hey, what are you doing speaking up on East Timor?" "We're trying to keep that quiet"." "We didn't hear a thing." "What we did hear, and this was quite interesting, is that there was a guy named Arnold Kohen, and he became a one-person lobby." "I appreciate the nice things that Karl Meyer said about me in his interview, but I object to the notion that a one-man lobby was formed, or anything like that." "I think that if there weren't a large network composed of the American Catholic Bishops' Conference, composed of other church groups, human rights groups, composed of simply concerned citizens, and others, and a network of concern within the news media," "I think it would have been impossible to do anything at all at any time, and it would have been impossible to sustain things for as long as they've been sustained." "MEYER:" "Professor Chomsky and many people who engage in this kind of press analysis have one thing in common - most of them have never worked for a newspaper, many of them know very little about how newspapers work." "When Chomsky came around, he had with him a file of all the coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other papers of East Timor, and he would go to the meticulous degree that if, for example, The London Times" "had a piece on East Timor, and then it appeared in The New York Times, that if a paragraph was cut out, he'd compare, and he'd say, "Look - this key paragraph right near the end" "which is what tells the whole story was let out of The New York Times' version of the London Times' thing."" "CHOMSKY:" "There was a story in The London Times which was pretty accurate." "The New York Times revised it radically." "They didn't just leave a paragraph out." "They revised it, and gave it a totally different cast." "It was then picked up by Newsweek, giving it The New York Times' cast." "It ended up being a whitewash, whereas the original was an atrocity story." "So, I said to Chomsky at the time," ""Well, it may be that you're misinterpreting ignorance, haste, deadline pressure, etcetera, for some kind of determined effort to suppress an element of the story."" "He said, "Well, if it happened once, or twice, or three times" "I might agree with you, but if it happens a dozen times," "Mr Meyer, I think there's something else at work"." "It's not a matter of happening one time, two, five, a hundred." "It happened all the time." "I said, "Professor Chomsky, having been in this business, it happens a dozen times." "These are very imperfect institutions"." "When they did give coverage, it was from the point of view of... it was a whitewash of the United States." "Now, you know, that's not an error." "That's systematic, consistent behaviour, in this case without even any exception." "This is a much more subtle process than you get in the kind of sledgehammer rhetoric of the people that make an A to B equation between what the government does, what people think, and what newspapers say." "That..." "That sometimes what The Times does can make an enormous difference." "At other times, it has no influence whatsoever." "So... one of the greatest tragedies of our age is still happening in East Timor." "The Indonesians have killed up to a third of the population." "They're in concentration camps." "They conduct large-scale military campaigns against the people who are resisting, campaigns with names like Operation Eradicate, or Operation Clean Sweep." "Timorese women are subjected to a forced birth control programme, in addition to bringing in a constant stream of Indonesian settlers to take over the land." "Whenever people are brave enough to take to the streets in demonstrations or show the least sign of resistance, they just massacre them." "It's sort of like Indonesia, if we allow them to continue to stay in East Timor - the international community - they will simply digest East Timor and turn it into..." "they're trying to turn it into cash crop." "I mean, this is way beyond just demonstrating this subservience of the media to power." "I mean, they have real complicity in genocide in this case." "The reason that the atrocities can go on is because nobody knows about them." "If anyone knew about them, there'd be protests and pressure to stop them." "So therefore, by suppressing the facts, the media are making a major contribution to some of... probably the worst act of genocide since the Holocaust." "FRUM:" "You say that what the media do is to ignore certain kinds of atrocities that are committed by us and our friends, and to play up enormously atrocities that are committed by them and our enemies." "And you posit that there's a test of integrity and moral honesty which is to have a kind of equality of treatment of corpses." "I mean, every dead person should be in principle equal to every other dead person." "CHOMSKY:" "That's not what I say." " I'm glad it's not, because it's not what you do." "Of course it's not what I do." "Nor would I say it." "In fact, I say the opposite." "What I say is we should be responsible for our own actions primarily." "Because your method is not only to ignore the corpses created by them, but also to ignore corpses that are created by neither side, that are irrelevant to your ideological agenda." " That's totally untrue." " Let me give you an example." "Um... one of your own causes that you take very seriously is the cause of the Palestinians." "And a Palestinian corpse weighs very heavily on your conscience, and yet a Kurdish corpse does not." "That's not true at all." "I've been involved in Kurdish support groups for years." "That's..." "It's simply false." "Just ask the Kurdish..." "Ask the people who are involved in..." "You know, they come to me, I sign their petitions, and so on and so forth." "If you look at the things we've written." "Let's take a look..." "I'm not Amnesty International." "I can't do everything." "I'm a single human person." "But if you read..." "Take a look, say, at the book that Edward Herman and I wrote on this topic." "In it we discuss three kinds of atrocities - what we call benign bloodbaths, which nobody cares about, constructive bloodbaths, which are the ones we like, and nefarious bloodbaths, which are the ones the bad guys do." "The principle that I think we ought to follow is not the one that you stated." "You know, it's a very simple, ethical point." "You're responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions." "You're not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else's actions." "The most important thing for me and for you is to think about the consequences of your actions." "What can you affect?" "These are the things to keep in mind." "These are not just academic exercises." "We're not analysing the media on Mars, or in the 18th Century, or something like that." "We're dealing with real human beings who are suffering, and dying, and being tortured, and starving because of policies that we are involved in." "We as citizens of democratic societies are directly involved in and are responsible for, and what the media are doing is ensuring that we do not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the needs of the suffering people," "and not even the needs of the American people who would be horrified if they realised the blood that's dripping from their hands because of the way they're allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by the system." "What about the Third World?" "Well, despite everything, and it's pretty ugly and awful, these struggles are not over." "The struggle for freedom and independence never is completely over." "Their courage, in fact, is really remarkable." "Amazing." "I've personally had the privilege, and it is a privilege, of witnessing it a few times, in villages in Southeast Asia and Central America, and recently in the occupied West Bank, and it is astonishing to see." "And it's always amazing - at least to me it's amazing." "I can't understand it." "It's also very moving and inspiring." "In fact, it's kind of awe-inspiring." "Now, they rely very crucially on a very slim margin for survival that's provided by dissidence and turbulence within the imperial societies, and how large that margin is is for us to determine." "In today's On The Spot assignment, we're going to see just what's behind the making of movies." "The director and the crew are shooting a documentary film." "Let's take a closer look." "Bob, this word "documentary", what would you say is the difference between a documentary film and a feature movie?" "Well, there are a good many differences." "One would be length." "Generally speaking, documentaries are shorter than feature films." "Also, documentaries have something to say in the way of a message." "They are informational films." "Also, another term that's used interchangeably with documentary is the word "actuality"." "PRESENTER:" "Bob, is this the thing you hold up in front of the camera before each scene?" "BOB:" "This is a clapperboard, yes." "This identifies on the visual camera the scene number and the take number." "And also, as you heard, on the soundtrack, the editor back at the studio puts the two pieces of film together, matches where the lips of the clapper meet, and there you are in synch." "MILLER:" "Before the break, you were mentioning the media putting forth the information that the power elite want." "I'm not sure if I understand." "How does the power elite do this?" "Why do we stand for it?" "Why does it work so well?" "Well, I think..." "I mean, there are really two questions here." "One - is this picture of the media true?" "And there, you have to look at the evidence." "I've given one example, and that shouldn't convince anybody." "One has to look at a lot of evidence to see whether this is true." "I think anyone who investigates it will find out that the evidence to support it is simply overwhelming." "It's probably one of the best supported conclusions in the social sciences." "The other question is, how does it work?" " Noam Chomsky?" " I'm the..." "I'm the media guy." "What would you like?" "I got you an International Herald Tribune." "Anything in a Western language which doesn't include Dutch." "What have you got?" " Financial Times." " Financial Times, absolutely." "That's the only paper that tells the truth." "You get the one where they've been debating back and forth?" "NRC Handelsblad." "CHOMSKY:" "Handelsblad?" " Train to?" " Ammerswurth." "CHOMSKY:" "Well, this evening's programme is scheduled as a debate, which puzzled me all the way through." "There are some problems." "One problem is that no proposition has been set forth." "As I understand "debate", people advocate or oppose something." "Rather more sensibly, a topic has been proposed for discussion." "Er... the topic is manufacture of consent." "BOLKESTEIN:" "It's unusual for a member of the government to debate with a professor in public." "It hasn't happened in Holland before." "I don't think it oten happens elsewhere." "(Bell)" "Mr Bolkestein, the floor is yours." "BOLKESTEIN:" "Now, we all know that a theory can never be established merely by examples." "It can only be established by showing some internal, inherent logic." "Professor Chomsky has not done so." "Professor Chomsky?" "CHOMSKY:" "He's right to say you can't just pick examples." "You have to do them rationally." "That's why we compared examples." "The truth is that things are not as simple as Professor Chomsky maintains." "Another of Professor Chomsky's case studies concerns the treatment that Cambodia has received in the Western press." "Here, he goes badly off the rails." "(Laughter)" "We didn't discuss Cambodia." "We compared Cambodia with East Timor, two very closely paired examples." "And we gave approximately 300 pages of detail covering this in Political Economy of Human Rights, including a reference to every article we could discover about Cambodia." "BOLKESTEIN:" "Many Western intellectuals do not like to face the facts and balk at the conclusions that any untutored person would draw." "Many people are very irritated by the fact that we exposed the extraordinary deceit over Cambodia and paired it with the simultaneous suppression of the US-supported, ongoing atrocities in Timor." "People don't like that." "For one thing, we were challenging the right to lie in defence of the state." "For another thing, we were exposing the apologetics and support for actual ongoing atrocities." "That doesn't make you popular." "(Bell)" "BOLKESTEIN:" "Where did he learn about the atrocities in East Timor or in Central America, if not in the same free press which he so derides?" "You can find out where I learned about them by looking at my footnotes - from Human Rights reports, from church reports, from refugee studies, and extensively, from the Australian press." "Nothing from the American press - it was silenced." "Chairman, this is an attempt at intellectual intimidation." "These are the ways of the bully." "Professor Chomsky uses the oldest debating trick on record." "He erects a man of straw and proceeds to hack away at him." "(Bell)" "Professor Chomsky calls this the "manufacture of consent"." "I call it "the creation of consensus"." "In Holland, we call it "Draagvlak", which means "foundation"." "Professor Chomsky thinks it is deceitful." "But it is not." "In a representative democracy, it means winning people for one's point of view." "But I do not think that Professor Chomsky believes in representative democracy." "I think he believes in direct democracy." "With Rosa Luxemburg, he longs for the creative, spontaneous, self-correcting force of mass action." "That is the vision of the anarchist." "It is also a boy's dream." "(Ripple of laughter)" "Those who believe in democracy and freedom have a serious task ahead of them." "What they should be doing, in my view, is dedicating their efforts to helping the despised common people to struggle for their rights and to realise the democratic goals that constantly surface throughout history." "They should be serving not power and privilege but rather their victims." "Freedom and democracy are, by now, not merely values to be treasured." "They are quite possibly the prerequisite to survival." "It's a conspiracy theory, pure and simple." "It is not borne out by the facts." "Mr Chairman, I have to go to Amsterdam." "If you'll excuse me, I'm leaving." "(Laughter)" "CHAIRMAN:" "One thing is sure." "Their consent has not been manufactured tonight." "CHOMSKY:" "There is nothing more remote from what I'm discussing than a conspiracy theory." "If I give an analysis of, say, the economic system, and I point out that General Motors tries to maximise profit and market share, that's not a conspiracy theory." "That's an institutional analysis." "That has nothing to do with conspiracies." "And that's precisely the sense in which we're talking about the media." "The phrase "conspiracy theory" is one that's constantly brought up." "And I think its effect, simply, is to discourage institutional analysis." "WINTONICK:" "You think there's a connection about what the government wants us to know and what the media tell us?" "It's not Communism, but I think, to a certain point, it is sensitised." "They don't always tell the truth, the way it goes, huh?" "You got that right." "Do you think the information you're getting from this paper is biased in any way?" "Oh, yeah." "I think, by and large, it's well done." "You get both sides of the stories." "You get the liberal side and the conservative side, so to speak." "I don't think you get a very balanced picture because they only have 20 seconds for a news item, or whatever, and they're going to pick out, a highlight." "Every network is going to cover the same highlight." "And that's all you're going to see." "You get what they want you to hear." "You think they're biased in some way, then?" "Nah." "Here we go." "See you later." "Is it possible for the lights to get a little brighter so I can see somebody out there?" "STUDENT:" "Yeah, for the last hour and 41 minutes, you've been whining about how the elite and how the government have been... using thought control to keep radicals like yourself out of the public limelight." "Now, you're here." "I don't see any CIA men waiting to drag you off." "You were in the paper." "That's where everyone here heard you were coming from, in the paper." "I'm sure they're going to publish your comments in the paper." "In a lot of countries, you would have been shot for what you have done today." "So, what are you whining about?" "We are allowing you to speak." "I don't see any thought control." "CHOMSKY:" "First of all, I haven't said one word about my being kept out of the limelight." "The way it works here is quite different." "I don't think you heard what I was saying." "The way it works here is, that there is a system of shaping and control, which gives a certain perception of the world." "I gave one example." "I'll give you sources where you can find thousands more." "And it has nothing to do with me." "It has to do with marginalising the public and ensuring that they don't get in the way of elites who are supposed to run things without interference." "KLEINHAUS:" "In a review of The Chomsky Reader, it was written that, "As he's been forced to the margins, he's become strident and rigid."" "Do you feel this categorisation of your later writings is accurate and that you've been a victim of this sort of process you've been describing?" "Well, the business about being forced..." "Other people will have to judge about the stridency." "I won't..." "I don't believe it." "But that's for other people to judge." "But the matter of being forced to the margins is one of fact." "The fact is the opposite of what is claimed." "The fact is, it's much easier to gain access to even the major media now than it was 20 years ago." "MO YERS:" "You've dealt in such unpopular truths and have been such a lonely figure as a consequence of that." "Do you ever regret either that you took the stand you took, have written the things you have written, or that we had listened to you earlier?" "Er..." "I don't." "I mean, there are particular things which I would do differently." "Because you think about things differently." " But, in general, I would say I do not regret it." " Do you like being controversial?" "No, it's a nuisance." "Because this medium pays little attention to dissenters, not just Noam Chomsky, but most dissenters do not get much of a hearing in this medium." "It's understandable." "They wouldn't be performing their societal function if they allowed favoured truths to be challenged." "CHOMSKY:" "Now, notice that's not true when I cross the border anywhere." "So I have easy access to the media in just about every other country in the world." "That's for a number of reasons." "One is that I'm primarily talking about the US." "And it's much less threatening." "Your view there is that the militarisation of the American economy essentially has come about because there are not other means of controlling the US people." "CHOMSKY:" "In a democratic society." "It may be paradoxical, but the freer the society is, the more it's necessary to resort to devices like induced fear." "OK, I'll go along with that." "Arguably, he is the most important intellectual alive today." "And if my programme can give him 500,000 people listening or three-quarters of a million people listening," "I'll be delighted." "OK, Professor, in your own time." "Wartime planners understood that actual war aims should not be revealed." "CHOMSKY:" "A part of the reason why the media in Canada and Belgium, etc are more open is that it just doesn't matter that much what people think." "It matters very much what the politically articulate sectors of the population, those narrow minorities, think and do in the United States, because of its overwhelming dominance on the world scene." "But that's also a reason for wanting to work here." "...what we might call the fith freedom - the freedom to rob, exploit, and dominate and to curb mischief by any feasible means." "It's "conclude", not "include"." "PRODUCER:" "From the top." "CHOMSKY:" "The United States is ideologically narrower in general than other countries." "Furthermore, the structure of the American media is such as to pretty much eliminate critical discussion." "Our guests are as far apart on the Contra question as American intellectuals can be." "CHOMSKY:" "If we had the slightest concern with democracy, which we do not, in our foreign affairs, and never have, we would turn to countries where we have influence like El Salvador." "Now, in El Salvador, they don't call the Archbishop bad names." "What they do is murder him." "They do not censor the press." "They wipe the press out." "They sent the army in to blow up the church radio station." "The editor of the independent paper was found in a ditch, mutilated, and cut to pieces." " Don't..." " May I continue?" "I did not interrupt you." "Don't you want to put a time value on anything you say or do you want to lie systematically on TV?" " I'm talking about 1980." " You are a systematic liar." " Did these things happen or not?" " Not in the context which you suggested." "You are a phoney, mister, and it's time that the people read you correctly." "It's clear why you want to divert me from the discussion." "No, it's not." "We're getting tired of rubbish." " But let's continue with..." " Except we can't." "We're out of time." "Let me thank you, John Silver and Noam Chomsky." "OK." "STUDENT:" "Last time you were here, you spoke about how, when you go overseas, you are given access to the mass media." "But here, that doesn't seem to be the case." "Has that changed at all?" "Have you ever been invited to appear on Nightline or Brinkley?" "CHOMSKY:" "Yes, I have a couple of times been invited to speak on Nightline." "I couldn't do it." "I had another talk and something or other." "To tell you the honest truth, I don't really care very much." "FAIR, the media monitoring group, published a very interesting study of Nightline." "It shows that their conception of a spectrum of opinion is ridiculously narrow, at least by European or world standards." "Let me tell you a personal experience." "I happened to be in Madison, Wisconsin, on a listener-supported radio station, a community radio station, a very good one." "It was an interview with the news director." "I'd been on the programme dozens of times, usually by telephone." "And he's very good, he gets all sorts of people." "He started the interview by playing for me a tape of an interview that he had just had and had broadcast with a guy who's..." "some mucky-muck in Nightline." "I think his name is Jeff Greenfield or some such name." "Does that name mean anything?" "I'm Jeff Greenfield from Nightline in New York." "We've got just a selection of guests to analyse things." "Why is Noam Chomsky never on Nightline?" "GREENFIELD:" "I couldn't begin to tell you." "HANSEN:" "He's one of the world's leading intellectuals." "GREENFIELD:" "I have no idea." "I mean, I can make some guesses." "He may be one of the leading intellectuals who can't talk on television." "You know, that's a standard that's very important." "To us." "If you've got a 22-minute show, and a guy takes five minutes to warm up..." "Now, I don't know whether Chomsky does or not." "...he's out." "One of the reasons why Nightline has the usual suspects is, one thing you have to do when you book a show is know that the person can make the point within the framework of TV." "If people don't like that, they should understand it is as sensible to book somebody who takes eight minutes to answer as it is to book somebody who doesn't speak English." "In the normal given flow, that's another culture-bound thing." "We've got to have English speakers and concision." "So Greenfield or whatever his name is hit the nail on the head." "The US media are alone in that you must meet the condition of concision." "You've got to say things between two commercials or in 600 words." "And that's a very important fact." "Because the beauty of concision, you know, saying a couple of sentences between two commercials..." "The beauty of that is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts." "GREENFIELD:" "I was reading Chomsky 20 years ago." "Didn't he co-author a book called Engineering Consent or Manufacturing Consent?" "I mean, some of that stuff, to me, looks like it's from Neptune." "This is the first time the Neptune system has been seen clearly by human eyes." "These pictures, taken only hours ago by Voyager-2, are its latest contribution." "GREENFIELD:" "You know, he's perfectly entitled to say I'm seeing it through a prism, too." "But my view of his notions about the limits of debate in this country is absolutely wacko." "Suppose I get up on Nightline, say." "And I'm given whatever it is, two minutes." "And I say Gaddafi is a terrorist, Khomeini is a murderer, you know, etc, etc." "The Russians, you know, invaded Afghanistan." "All this sort of stuff." "I don't need any evidence." "Everybody just nods." "On the other hand, suppose you say something that just isn't regurgitating conventional pieties." "Suppose you say something that's the least bit unexpected or controversial." "You say:" "The biggest international terror operations that are known are the ones that are run out of Washington." "Or suppose you say:" "What happened in the 1980s is, the US government was driven underground." "Suppose I say the United States is invading South Vietnam, as it was?" "The best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt." "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-War American President would have been hanged." "The Bible is probably the most genocidal book in our total canon." "Education is a system of imposed ignorance." "There's no more morality in world affairs than there was in the time of Genghis Khan." "There are just different..." "You know, there are just different factors to be concerned with." "Noam Chomsky, thank you." "Well, you know, people will quite reasonably expect to know what you mean." ""Why did you say that?" "I've never heard that before." "If you said that, you'd better have a reason, better have some evidence." "In fact, you'd better have a lot of evidence because that's a pretty startling comment"." "You can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision." "That's the genius of this structural constraint." "And in my view, if people like, say, Nightline, MacNeil, Lehrer and so on were smarter, if they were better propagandists, they would let dissidents on, let them on more, in fact." "The reason is that they would sound like they were from Neptune." "PRESENTER:" "Then our conversation on the Middle East crisis with the activist, writer and professor, Noam Chomsky." "Again, there has been an offer on the table which we rejected, an Iraqi offer of last April..." "MACNEIL:" "OK, I have to to eliminate their chemical and other unconventional arsenals if Israel were to simultaneously do the same." " We have to end it there." " That should be pursued as well." "Sorry to interrupt." "I have to end it." "That's the end of our time." "Professor Chomsky, thanks." "ATT has supported the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour since 1983 because quality information and quality communication is our idea of a good connection." "ATT - the right choice." " Thank you." " Could you just sit there for half a second?" "It's just for a two-shot, that's all." "Then we can do anything else with that." "OK." "Yeah, what about the mic?" "Is that a problem?" "OK, right." "The idea of this one is it's just a shot where I'm seen talking to you." "I'll ask you, though, not to speak to me or move your lips, so I can be seen to ask a question." "The reason for the shot is simply this." "OK, just don't talk to me and I'll keep going." "The reason for the shot" " I'll explain it because I find that's the easiest way to do it - is I need a shot where you're sitting and seeing and listening while I'm asking you a question." "We can use the shot to introduce you, explain who you are, where you fit into my piece." "But if you don't speak to me, I can also use..." "Got it?" "OK, thanks for your time." "If there is a narrower range of opinion in the United States and it is harder to express a variety of different opinions, why do you live in the US?" "Well, first of all, it's my country, and secondly, it's in many ways - as I said before - it's the freest country in the world." "I think there's more possibilities for change here than in any other country I know." "But again, comparatively speaking, it's the country where the state is probably most restrictive." "Isn't that what you should look at comparatively rather than in absolute terms?" "You don't give that impression." "Maybe I don't give the impression." "I say it oten enough." "What I've said over and over again," "I've said it tonight, I've written it a million times, is that the United States is a very free society." "It's also a very rich society." "Of course, the United States is a scandal from the point of view of its wealth." "Given the natural advantages that the United States has, in terms of resources and lack of enemies and so on, the United States should have a level of health and welfare and so on that's, you know, on an order of magnitude beyond anybody else in the world." "We don't." "The United States is last among 20 industrialised societies in infant mortality." "That's a scandal of American capitalism." "And it ends up being a very free society which does a lot of rotten things in the world, OK?" "There's no contradiction there." "Greece was a free society by the standards of Athens, you know." "It was also a vicious society as regards its imperial behaviour." "There's virtually no correlation - maybe none - between the internal freedom of a society and its external behaviour." "You start your line of discussion at a moment that is historically useful for you." " But you picked the beginning." " The grand fact of the post-war world is that the Communist imperialists, by the use of terrorism, by the use of deprivation of freedom, have contributed to the continuing bloodshed." "The sad thing about it is, not only the bloodshed, but the fact that they seem to dispossess you of the power of rational observation." "I think that's about five per cent true." "Or maybe ten per cent true." "It certainly is true..." " Why do you give that?" " May I complete a sentence?" "It's perfectly true that there were areas of the world, in particular, Eastern Europe, where Stalinist imperialism... very brutally took control and still maintains control." "But there are also very vast areas of the world where we were doing the same thing." "And there's quite an interplay in the Cold War." "What you just described is, I believe, a mythology about the Cold War." "It may have been tenable ten years ago but it's inconsistent with contemporary scholarship." "Ask a Czech." "Ask a Guatemalan, ask a Dominican." "Ask the president of the Dominican Republic, ask a person from South Vietnam, ask a Thai." "Obviously, if you can't distinguish between the nature of our venture in Guatemala and the nature of the Soviet Union's in Prague, we have difficulties." "(Doorbell sound)" "Er... now, what about making the media more responsive and democratic?" "Well, there are very narrow limits for that." "It's kind of like asking, "How do we make corporations more democratic?"" "Well, the only way to do that is get rid of them." "I mean, if you have concentrated power..." "I don't want to say you can do nothing." "Like the church can show up at the stockholders' meeting and start screaming about not investing in South Africa." "And sometimes that has marginal effects." "I don't want to say it has no effect." "But you can't really affect the structure of power." "Because to do that would be a social revolution." "Unless you're ready for a social revolution, that is, power is going to be somewhere else, the media are going to have their present structure and represent their present interests." "That's not to say that one shouldn't try to do things." "It makes sense to try to push the limits of a system." "It only takes one or two people that think they have integrity as journalists to give you some good press." "That's important." "That goes back to something that came up before." "There are contradictions." "You know, things are complex." "It's not monolithic." "I mean, the mass media themselves are complicated institutions with internal contradictions." "So, on the one hand, there's the commitment to indoctrination and control." "But on the other hand, there's the sense of professional integrity." "REPORTER:" "She works alone, as her own boss, writing newspaper columns and producing radio commentaries for a hodgepodge of small clients across the country." "This so-called leather-lunged Texan has been firing questions at our chief executive for almost 40 years." "Many a young man in this country is disillusioned by his government these days." "Well, this is a question which you very properly bring to the attention of the nation." "It's not that we haven't held press conferences." "I was just waiting for Sarah to come back." "Mr President, that's very nice of you and I appreciate it." "Sir, I want to call your attention to a real problem we've got in this country today." "REPORTER:" "The unique, terrifying McClendon questions reflect her desire to get information." "MCCLENDON:" "I want to ask your new man what he feels..." " Here." "(Laughter)" "REPORTER:" "With enough know-how and persistence, she usually gets her man." "MCCLENDON:" "What would you do if you were in a situation where you were trying to be an honest reporter and you were worried sick about your country and you saw how sick it was, and you were facing this weak White House and a weak Congress," "as a reporter, what would you do?" "CHOMSKY:" "I think there are a lot of reporters who do a good job." "I have a lot of friends in the press who I think do a terrific job." "I know they are." "They want to..." "Well, first of all, you have to understand what the system is." "And smart reporters do understand what it is." "You have to understand what the pressures and commitments are, what the barriers are and what the openings are." "Right ater the Iran-Contra hearings, a lot of good reporters understood, "Things are going to be more open for a couple of months"." "So they rammed through stories they couldn't even talk about before." " And ater Watergate." " The same ater Watergate." "Then it closes up again." "Most people, I imagine, simply internalise the values." "That's the easiest way and the most successful way." "You just internalise the values and then you regard yourself, in a way correctly, as acting perfectly freely." "All right, let's get to the White House now where I think veteran correspondent Frank Sesno can tell us a little bit about self-censorship." "That internal guidance system's always going on, isn't it?" " Is there any formal censorship there?" " There's no self-censorship." "If somebody tells me something, I'll pass it on, unless there's a particular, compelling reason not to." "I can't deny that I'd like to have access to the Oval Office and all the same maps the President's looking at." "But that's not possible, it's not realistic, and probably not desirable." "Hello." "How are you?" "Go and sit down there, please." "Welcome to Holland." "I'll introduce you first with a few lines." "Professor Chomsky, Noam Chomsky." "Chomsky has been called the Einstein of modern linguistics." "The New York Times has said he's arguably the most important intellectual alive today." "But his presence here has sparked a protest." "This book has poisoned the world." "All lies are in there." "As the Vietnamese people, we come here to burn the book." "He said that in Vietnam there is no violation of human rights and no crime in Cambodia - it's wrong." "Chomsky using his profession, he using that to poison the world." "And we come here to protest that." "I don't mind the denunciations, frankly." "I mind the lies." "Intellectuals are very good at lying." "They're professionals at it." "Vilification is a wonderful technique." "There's no way of responding." "If somebody calls you an anti-Semite, what can you say? "I'm not an anti-Semite"?" "If somebody says, "You're a racist, you're a Nazi", you always lose." "I mean, the person who throws the mud always wins, because there's no way of responding." "Professor Chomsky seems to believe that the people he criticises fall into one of two classes - liars or dupes." "Consider what happens when I discuss the case of Robert Faurisson." "Let me recall the facts." " Let's not go into details." " The details happen to be important." "Yes, but I have only one question for you." " Do the facts matter or don't they?" " Of course." "Well, let me tell you what the facts are." "(Heckling)" "Faurisson says that the massacre of the Jews in the Holocaust is a historic lie." "WOMAN:" "Can we have the next question?" "SPEAKER:" "No." "No, this is an important one." "It has a lot to do with the topic." "WOMAN:" "Get off!" "REYNOLDS:" "Your views are very controversial." "Perhaps one of the things that has been most controversial and you've been most strongly criticised for was your defence of a French intellectual who was suspended from his university post for contending that there were no Nazi death camps in World War II." "FAURISSON:" "My name is Robert Faurisson." "I am 60." "I am a university professor in Lyons, France." "Behind me, you may see the courthouse of Paris," "Le Palais de Justice." "In this place," "I was convicted many times at the beginning of the '80s." "I was charged by nine associations, mostly Jewish associations, for inciting hatred, racial hatred, for racial defamation, for damage by falsifying history." "Professor Chomsky and a number of other intellectuals signed a petition in which Faurisson is called "a respected professor of literature who merely tried to make his findings public"." "Perhaps we can start with just the story of Robert Faurisson and your involvement." "More than 500 people signed..." "Maybe 600." "Mostly... universitaires." "Scholars." "And what happened to the other 499 of them?" "How come we only hear about Chomsky's signature?" "Well, I think it's because Chomsky has, in himself, a kind of political power." "CHOMSKY:" "I signed a petition calling on the tribunal to defend his civil rights." "At that point, the French press, which has no conception of freedom of speech, concluded that since I had called for his civil rights," "I was therefore defending his thesis." "Faurisson then published a book in which he tried to prove that the Nazi gas chambers never existed." "What we deny is that there was an extermination programme and an extermination, actually." "Especially in gas chambers or gas vans." "BOLKESTEIN:" "The book contains a preface written by Professor Chomsky in which he calls Faurisson" ""a relatively apolitical sort of liberal"." "A Communist is a man, a Jew is a man, a Nazi is a man." "I am a man." "Are you a Nazi?" "I am not a Nazi." "How would you describe yourself politically?" "Nothing." " The preface that you wrote..." " No, that's not the preface that I wrote." "Because I never wrote a preface and you know that I never wrote a preface." "He's referring to a statement of mine on civil liberties which was added to a book in which Faurisson... (Heckling)" " Excuse me." "You're a linguist and the language you use has meaning!" "And when you describe Faurisson as an "apolitical liberal", or as someone whose views can be dignified by the words "findings" or "conclusions", that is a judgment and that is a favourable judgment of his views." "On the contrary." " May I continue with the facts?" " You can continue with the facts for hours." "But there are a few facts that..." "Yeah, OK." "Let's get to the so-called preface." "I was then asked by the person who organised the petition to write a statement on freedom of speech." "Just banal comments about freedom of speech, pointing out the difference between defending a person's right to express his views and defending the views expressed." "So I did that." "I wrote a rather banal statement called "Some Elementary Remarks on Freedom of Expression"." "And I told them, "Do what you like with it"." "So Pierre produced a book in which all the arguments of Faurisson were to be put in front of the court." "And we thought it wise to use the text of Noam Chomsky as a kind of warning, a forward, to say that it was a matter of freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of research." "Why did you try at the last moment to get it back from the book?" "That's the one thing I'm sorry about." " But that's the real important thing." " No, it's not." "You mean that I tried to retract it?" " With that, you said it was wrong of you to do it." " No." "Take a look at what I did." "I wrote a letter, which was then published, in which I said," ""Look, things have reached a point where the French intellectual community simply is incapable of understanding the issues." "At this point, it's just going to confuse matters even more if my comments on freedom of speech are attached to a book which I didn't know existed." "So, just to clarify things, you'd better separate them"." "Now, in retrospect, I shouldn't have done that." "I should have just said, "Fine." "Let it appear, because it ought to appear"." "But apart from that," "I regard this as not only trivial, but as compared with other positions I've taken on freedom of speech, invisible." "I do not think the state ought to have the right to determine historical truth and to punish people who deviate from it." "I'm not willing to give the state that right, even if they..." " Are you denying the gas chambers existed?" " Of course not." "I'm saying, if you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like." "Goebbels was in favour of freedom of speech for views he liked, right?" "So was Stalin." "If you're in favour of freedom of speech, that means you're in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise." "Otherwise you're not in favour of freedom of speech." "There's two positions you can have on freedom of speech." "You can decide which you want." "With regard to my defence of the utterly offensive, the people who express utterly offensive views," "I haven't the slightest doubt that every commissar says," ""You're defending that person's views"." "No, I'm not." "I'm defending his right to express them." "The difference is crucial." "And the difference has been understood outside of fascist circles since the 18th century." "Is there anything like objectivity, scientific objectivity, reality?" " As a scientist, where do you stand on this?" " I'm not saying I defend the views." "If somebody publishes a scientific article which I disagree with," "I do not say the state ought to put him in jail, right?" " But you don't have to support him..." " I don't support him." "...and say, "I support him just for the sake of anybody saying what they want"." "Suppose this guy is taken to court and charged with falsification?" " Then I'll defend him." " But he wasn't taken to court." " Oh, you're wrong." " But when did you write the support?" "CHOMSKY:" "When he was brought to court." "And, in fact, the only support that I gave him was to say he has a right of freedom of speech, period." "OLMERT:" "There is no doubt in my mind that the example I gave about the story, that the Holocaust did not exist, is very, very typical." "I'll give you another example of this." "How much of the American press believes that Faurisson has anything to say?" "How much of the press in France..." "What percentage would you say?" "Is it higher than zero?" "Is it higher than zero?" "Have you ever seen anything in any newspaper or any journal saying that this man is anything other than a lunatic?" "I'll try to answer." " I just follow the case..." " That's a simple question." "I follow the case five or six years ago." "I happened to see that Noam Chomsky was in for strong criticism even from some of his supporters for doing something which could be interpreted only in terms of a campaign against Israel." "Going back years, I am absolutely certain that I've taken far more extreme positions on people who deny the Holocaust than you have." "For example, you go back to my earliest articles and you will find that I say that even to enter into the arena of debate on the question of whether the Nazis carried out such atrocities is already to lose one's humanity." "So I don't even think you ought to discuss the issue, if you want my opinion." "But if anybody wants to refute Faurisson, there's certainly no difficulty in doing so." "I'm not interested in freedom of speech and all that." "I have to win." "And that's the question." "And I shall win." "Cut." "(Train's hooter)" "I'm just an ordinary mum who just thinks in terms of..." "I don't want to some day be holding my grandchildren and watching something horrible happen and feel like I didn't do anything." "And I mean, it's obvious what you're doing." "My question is, on a practical level, where do you see the most practical place to put your energy?" "Tonight, I feel I'm overwhelmed." "I feel like it's too big, it's too much, to even make a dent in." "CHOMSKY:" "The way things change is because lots of people are working all the time." "You know, they're working in their communities, in their workplace or wherever they are." "And they're building up the basis for popular movements which are going to make changes." "That's the way everything has ever happened in history." "Whether it was the end of slavery, whether it was the democratic revolutions, or anything you want, you name it, that's the way it worked." "You get a very false picture of this from the history books." "In the history books, there's a couple of leaders." "You know, George Washington, or Martin Luther King or whatever." "And I don't want to say those people are unimportant." "Martin Luther King was important, but he was not the Civil Rights Movement." "Martin Luther King can appear in the history books cos lots of people whose names you will never know and whose names are all forgotten and who may have been killed and so on, were working down in the South." "When you have active... activists, and people concerned and people devoting themselves and dedicating themselves to social change or issues or whatever, then people like me can appear." "We can appear to be prominent." "But that's only cos somebody else is doing the work." "My work, whether it's giving hundreds of talks a year or spending 20 hours a week writing letters or writing books, is not directed to intellectuals and politicians." "It's directed to what are called "ordinary people"." "What I expect from them is, in fact, exactly what they are." "That they should try to understand the world and act in accordance with their decent impulses." "And that they should try to improve the world." "Many are willing to do that." "But they have to understand." "As far as I can see, in these things," "I feel that I'm simply helping people develop courses of intellectual self-defence." "What did you mean by that?" "What would such a course be?" "I don't mean go to school, because you'll not get it there." "It means you have to develop an independent mind and work on it." "That's extremely hard to do alone." "The beauty of our system is it isolates everybody." "Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube." "It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances." "You can't fight the world alone." "Some people can, but it's pretty rare." "The way to do it is through organisation." "So courses of intellectual self-defence will have to be in the context of political and other organisation." "And it makes sense, I think, to look at what the institutions are trying to do and to take that almost as a key." "What they're trying to do is what we're trying to combat." "If they're trying to keep people isolated and separate, and so on, then we'll try and do the opposite, bring them together." "So, in your local community, you want to have sources of alternative action, people with parallel concerns, maybe differently focused, but, at the core, sort of similar values and a similar interest in helping people defend themselves against external power" "and taking control of their lives and reaching out your hand to people who need it." "That's a common array of concerns." "You can learn about your own values and you can figure out how to defend yourself in conjunction with others." "Erm... are there one or two publications that I, as an average person, a biologist, can read to bypass this filter of our press?" "Now, if you ask, "What media can I turn to to get the right answers?"" "First of all, I wouldn't tell you that, because I don't think there's an answer." "The right answers are what you decide are the right answers." "Maybe everything I'm telling you is wrong." "It could perfectly well be." "I'm not God." "But that's something for you to figure out." "I can tell you what I think happens to be right." "But there isn't any reason why you should pay any attention to it." "What impact do you feel alternative media is currently having or could potentially have?" "I'm actually a little more interested in its potential." "And just to define my terms, by alternative media, I'm referring to media that are or could be citizen-controlled as opposed to state or corporate-controlled." "That's what's kept people together." "To the extent that people are able to do something constructive, it's because they have some way of interacting." "I've always felt it would be a very positive thing and it should be pushed as far as it can go." "I think it's going to have a very hard time." "There's just such a concentration of resources and power that alternative media, while extremely important, are going to have quite a battle." "It's true there are things which are small successes." "But it's because people have just been willing to put in an incredible effort." "Like, say, take Z Magazine." "I mean, that's a national magazine which literally has a staff of two and no resources." "Tell us a little about Z Magazine, what it is and what makes it different." "Go ahead." "Go ahead?" "Thank you." "ALBERT:" "We just wanted to do a magazine that would address all the sides of political life." "Economics, race, gender, authority, political relations." "And we wanted to do it in a way that would incorporate attention to how to not only understand what's going on, but how to make things better, what to aim for, and to provide, at the same time, humour, culture." "A kind of magazine that people could relate to and get a lot out of and participate in." "What we wanted to do, which we didn't think was provided by the existing magazines, was to give it a real activist slant." "So that it could be very useful to the variety of movements in the country." "We just felt there wasn't a magazine that reflected that, that inspired people, and that gave people a strategy and perhaps even a vision of how things could be better." "CHOMSKY:" "South End Press has sort of made it." "That is, they're surviving." "It's a small collective, again with no resources." "They've put out a lot of good books." "But for a South End book to get reviewed is almost impossible." "Editorially and business-wise, we make decisions based on a politics that no corporate publisher can really advocate because of their ties to corporate America." "We can solicit manuscripts based on what we feel is the relevance for the movement." "And we can make our business decisions based on whether we feel people can afford our books, whether we feel that a book might not make that much money but it needs to be out there, and maybe there is 1,000 people who would buy it." "And those are criteria that we feel are very precious in this day of corporate mergers." "And likewise, our structure about sharing work and continuing our training process as long as we're at the press." "There are losses there in terms of productivity, but in terms of empowerment, all of us are then able to say..." ""My perspective is different from yours"." "Then all of our intelligence gets used in making those decisions, and not just whoever happens to have done it the longest, whoever happens to have graduated from the best schools in order to be the best editor," "making all the decisions and only using his or her intelligence." "Citizen-supported radio in the United States has undergone a remarkable growth in the last decade." "It's perhaps the fastest-growing alternative media." "There are many reasons for this." "First and foremost is that it's enormously economical." "It reaches communities that have not been served by community radio before." "In Boulder, we see with someone like Noam Chomsky, who's been there, I believe, three times in the last six years, he has a tremendous audience." "And KGNU is partly responsible for that." "Because we play his tapes on a regular basis." "We play his lectures and his interviews." "So, when he does come to Boulder and people hear what he has to say, they're able to tune in, it's not something exotic or esoteric he's talking about." "It's material that they're very familiar with." "He's noted this, incidentally." "CHOMSKY:" "If there's a listener-supported radio station, it means that people can get daily, every day, a different way of looking at the world." "Not just what the corporate media want you to see, but a different picture, a different understanding." "Not only can you hear it, but you can participate in it." "You can add your own thoughts." "You can learn something, and so on." "Well, that's the way people become human." "That's the way you become human participants in a social and political system." "Hello, I'm Ed Robinson and this is non-corporate news." "What is non-corporate news and why is it necessary?" "I didn't want to just show another film at a library or something." "I wanted to make my own statement." "I thought it'd be more fun to do." "Perhaps I'd get others involved in a project." "Besides showing a film, we could make a film or a video." "The local cable station's hooked up to three communities" " Lynn, Swampscott and Salem." "So that's 30,000 people, or 30,000 homes." "I'm not sure." "But I'm sure... a lot of people see it and it'll be the kind of people who don't go out to see a film." "It'll go right into their houses." "So, if they're flipping through their channels, they might be able to get a completely new idea of the world." "CHOMSKY:" "So there's kind of networks of co-operation developing." "I mean, like here, for example." "There's a collection of stuff from a friend of mine in Los Angeles who does careful monitoring of the whole press in Los Angeles and a lot of the British press, which he reads." "And he does selections." "So I don't have to read the movie reviews and the local gossip and all this kind of stuff." "But I get the occasional nugget that sneaks through and that you find if you're carefully, intelligently and critically reviewing a wide range of press." "There are a fair number of people who do this and we exchange information." "We wrote this two-volume work." "We saw one another for a couple of weeks when we were getting started." "But then we wrote two volumes, essentially without seeing one another." "Just by phone, by mail, and exchanging manuscripts." "But this takes a lot of communication by mail." "My Chomsky file is a couple of feet thick." "The end result is that you do have access to resources in a way which I doubt that any national intelligence agency can duplicate, let alone scholarship." "So there are ways of compensating for the absence of resources." "People can do things." "For example, I found out about the arms flow to Iran by reading transcripts of the BBC and by reading an interview somewhere with an Israeli ambassador in one city and reading something else in the Israeli press." "OK, the information is there." "But it's there to a fanatic." "You know, somebody who wants to spend a substantial part of their time and energy exploring it and comparing today's lies with yesterday's leaks, and so on." "That's a research job." "And it just simply doesn't make any sense to ask the general population to dedicate themselves to this task on every issue." "I'm not given to false modesty." "There are things that I can do." "I know that I can do them reasonably well, including analysis and, you know study, research." "I know how to do that." "I think I've a reasonable understanding of the way the world works, as much as anyone can." "And that turns out to be a very useful resource for people who are doing active organising trying to engage themselves in a way which will make it a little bit of a better world." "And if you can help in those things, or participate in them, well, that's rewarding." "I wonder if you can envision a time when people like myself, and again, the naïve people of this world can again take pride in the United States?" "And is that even a healthy wish now?" "Because it's maybe this hunger for pride in our country that makes us more easily manipulated by the powers that you talk about." "Er..." "I think you first of all have to ask what you mean by your country." "Now, if you mean by "the country" the government," "I don't think you can be proud of it and I don't think you could ever be proud of it." "(Applause)" " Or be proud of any government." "It's not our government." "And you shouldn't be." "States are violent institutions." "The government of any country, including ours, represents a domestic power structure and it's usually violent." "States are violent to the extent that they're powerful." "That's roughly accurate." "You look at American history, it's nothing to write home about." "Why are we here?" "We're here because some ten million native Americans were wiped out." "That's not very pretty." "Until the 1960s, it was still cowboys and Indians." "In the 1970s, for the first time, really, it became possible, even for scholarship, to try to deal with the facts as they were." "For example, to deal with the fact that the Native American population was far higher than had been claimed." "Millions higher, maybe as many as ten million higher than was claimed." "That they had an advanced civilisation, and that there was something akin to genocide that took place." "Now, we went through 200 years of our history without facing that fact." "One of the effects of the 1960s is it's possible to at least begin to come to think about the facts." "Well, that's an advance." "INTERVIEWER:" "Do you think that this activism 20 years ago has made a difference in how our society operates now?" "CHOMSKY:" "It has not changed the institutions in the way they function." "But it has led to very significant cultural changes." "Remember, these movements of the '60s expanded in the '70s and expanded further in the '80s." "They reached into other parts of the society and different issues." "A lot of things that seemed outrageous in the '60s are taken for granted today." "So, for example, take the feminist movement, which barely began to exist in the '60s." "Now it's part of general consciousness and awareness." "The ecological movements began in the '70s." "The Third World solidarity movements were very limited in the '60s." "It was really Vietnam." "And in the '60s also, it was a student movement, as you say." "Now it's not." "Now it's mainstream America." "MO YERS:" "If there is more dissidence now than you can remember, why do you go on to write that the people feel isolated?" "Because I think much of the general population recognises that the organised institutions do not reflect their concerns and interests and needs." "They do not feel that they participate meaningfully in the political system." "They do not feel that the media are telling them the truth or even reflect their concerns." "They go outside of the organised institutions to act." "We see more of our elected leaders and know less of what they do." "This medium does that." "It's very striking." "The Presidential elections are almost removed from the point where the public takes them seriously as involving a matter of choice." "What do you think about what goes on in the White House?" "It's kept too private, I think." "Yeah, they should come out and talk to the people." " Yeah." " Who should talk to the people?" "George Bush!" "Well, it means that the political system increasingly... increasingly functions without public input." "It means, to an increasing extent, not only do people not ratify decisions presented to them, but they don't take the trouble of ratifying them." "They assume that the decisions are going on independently of what they do in the poll booth." "MO YERS:" "Ratification would be what?" "CHOMSKY:" "Ratification would mean there are two positions presented to me, the voter." "I go into the polling booth and I push one or another button, depending on which of those positions I want." "That's a very limited form of democracy." "Really meaningful democracy would mean that I play a role in forming those decisions, in creating those positions." "That would be real democracy." "We're very far from that." "We're even departing from a point where there is ratification." "When you have stage-managed elections, with the public relations industry determining what words come out of people's mouth, candidates deciding what to say on the basis of tests that determine what the effect will be across the population," "somehow people don't see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy." "(Fanfare)" "The solemn moment is near." "But first, the swearing-in of Dan Quayle." "Please move to your seats." "For the first time in this century, for the first time in perhaps all history," "Man does not have to invent a system by which to live." "We don't have to talk late into the night about which form of government is better." "We don't have to wrest justice from the kings." "We only have to summon it from within ourselves." "This is a time when the future seems a door you can walk right through into a room called Tomorrow." "Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom." "The people of the world agitate for free expression and free thought through the door to the moral and intellectual satisfactions that only liberty allows." "We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for men on Earth." "Through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state." "I've spoken of 1,000 points of light, of all the community organisations that are spread like stars throughout the nation doing good." "To the world, too, we offer new engagement and a renewed vow." " We will stay strong to protect the peace." "(Whir of helicopter)" "The offered hand is a reluctant fist." "America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle." "We, as a people, have such a purpose today." "It is... to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world." "Referring back to your earlier comment about escaping from or doing away with capitalism," "I was wondering what scheme, workable scheme, you would put in its place." "Me?" " Well, what I would..." "(Laughter)" "What would you suggest to others who might be in a position to set it up and get it going?" "Well, I mean, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, wage slavery is intolerable." "I don't think people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive." "I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically by their participants, by the communities in which they exist, and so on, and I think basically through various kinds of free association." "Historically, have there been any sustained examples on any substantial scale of societies which approximated to the anarchist ideal?" "There are small societies, small in number, that have, I think, done so quite well." "And there are a few examples of large-scale libertarian revolutions which were largely anarchist in their structure." "As to the first, small societies, extending over a long period," "I myself think the most dramatic example was perhaps the Israeli Kibbutzim, which, for a long period - it may or may not be true today - really were constructed on anarchist principles." "That is, of direct worker control, integration of agriculture, industry, service, personal life, on an egalitarian basis with direct and quite active participation in self-management, and were, I should think, extraordinarily successful." "A good example of a really large-scale anarchist revolution, or largely anarchist revolution, the best example to my knowledge, is the Spanish Revolution in 1936." "In fact, you can't tell what would have happened." "That anarchist revolution was simply destroyed by force." "But during the period in which it was alive, I think it was an inspiring testimony to the ability of poor working people to organise and manage their affairs extremely successfully, without coercion or control." "How far does the success of libertarian socialism or anarchism as a way of life really depend on a fundamental change in the nature of man, both in his motivation, his altruism, and also in his knowledge and sophistication?" "I think it not only depends on it but, in fact, the whole purpose of libertarian socialism is that it will contribute to it." "It will contribute to a spiritual transformation." "Precisely that kind of great transformation in the way humans conceive of themselves and their ability to act, to decide, to create, to produce, to enquire." "Precisely that spiritual transformation that... social thinkers from the Let-Marxist tradition, from Luxemburg, say, on over through anarcho-syndicalists, have emphasised." "So, on the one hand, it requires that spiritual transformation." "But also, its purpose is to create institutions which will contribute to that transformation." "INTERVIEWER:" "You've written that, in looking at contributions of gited thinkers, one must make sure to understand their contributions, but also to eliminate the errors in them." "And, of your ideas, what would you guess would be discarded and what would be assimilated by future thinkers?" "Well, I would assume virtually everything would be discarded." "For example..." "Here, we have to distinguish." "The work that I do in my professional area..." "If I still believed what I believed ten years ago, I'd assume the field is dead." "So I assume, next time you read a student's paper, you're going to see something that has to be changed and you continue to make progress." "In dealing with social and political issues, in my view, what is at all understood is pretty straightforward." "There may be deep and complicated things." "But, if so, they're not understood." "The basic..." "To the extent that we understand society at all, it's pretty straightforward." "And I don't think those simple understandings are likely to undergo much change." "The point is that you have to work." "That's why the propaganda system is so successful." "Very few people are going to have the time or the energy or the commitment to carry out the constant battle that's required to get outside of, you know..." "MacNeil/Lehrer or Dan Rather, somebody like that." "The easy thing to do..." "You come home from work, you're tired, have had a busy day." "You're not going to spend the evening carrying out a research project." "So you turn on the tube and say it's probably right." "You look at the headlines in the paper and then you watch the sports." "And that's basically the way the system of indoctrination works." "Sure, the other stuff is there, but you're going to have to work to find it." "Modern industrial civilisation has developed within a certain system of convenient myths." "The driving force of modern industrial civilisation has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation." "Now, it's long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time." "It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails, as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can." "At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible." "Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others." "Or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control." "As long as some specialised class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves." "But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole." "By now, that means the global community." "The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must - namely, to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the "stupid majority", and remove them from the public arena." "The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided." "In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured." "They may well be essential to survival." "Thank you." "(Applause)" "METCALF:" "He's up there thinking for himself." "And he's deciphering this tremendously overweighted body of information, which he puts into an order and gives you the feeling that you can do the same thing, that the whole thing is decipherable." "And he also gives you the sense that there is a source, there is a centre to the to a dissenting population, although we feel that there's no centre." "And I think that is what reactivated in me a desire to get back... get reacquainted with the political scene ater 30 years of alienation from it." "You do hundreds of interviews and lectures." "And you're dealing with massacres in East Timor and invasions of Panama, etc." "Pretty horrific stuff- death squads." "What keeps you going?" "Don't you get burned out on this material?" "It's mainly a matter of whether you can look yourself in the mirror, I think." "GUARD:" "Got to go," " get these people into town." " Maybe you could say, "All aboard", for us?" "All aboard!" "Bye-bye!" "Bye!" "(Beep)" "No, couldn't see it!" "Just hit the microphone." "Thank you." "Goodbye, Canada." "Goodbye, Canada." "Bye!" "I think I've gone past the hour that you agreed to." "In your introduction, you said that he's from Harvard." "Oh, I heard that." "Oh, yes, that is true." "We'll bleep it." "Sorry about making you answer that in such a short time!" "It worked." "Did we hit it in two minutes?" "Well, we did pretty well, actually." "That means less sports and that's fine with me." "The people don't know what's going on." "If the people knew what you say here today, they'd happily change." "Thank you." "On that optimistic note, Professor Chomsky, thank you very much indeed." "So, how did it go?" "I thought it was sort of technical-sounding." "But..." "There wasn't much of a rhythm." " Did you ever think of running for President?" "(Laughter)" "If I ran for President, the first thing I'd do is tell people not to vote for me." "This guy's got to go home, he really does." "And people still believe the politics of the world changes." " Why don't you let him go home?" " Thanks."