もうひとつチョムスキー
SATURDAY, AUG 17, 2013 09:30 PM +0900
Chomsky: The U.S. behaves nothing like a democracy
The MIT professor lays out how the majority of U.S. policies are opposed to what wide swaths of the public want
NOAM CHOMSKY, ALTERNET
American power is diminishing, as it has been in fact since its peak in 1945, but it’s still incomparable. And it’s dangerous.
On and on, the policy throughout is almost the opposite of public opinion, which is a typical property of RECD,“really existing capitalist democracy
In the past, the United States has sometimes, kind of sardonically, been described as a one-party state: the business party with two factions called Democrats and Republicans. That’s no longer true. It’s still a one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction. The faction is moderate Republicans, who are now called Democrats. There are virtually no moderate Republicans in what’s called the Republican Party and virtually no liberal Democrats in what’s called the Democratic [sic] Party. It’s basically a party of what would be moderate Republicans and similarly, Richard Nixon would be way at the left of the political spectrum today. Eisenhower would be in outer space.
In short, Really Existing Capitalist Democracy is very remote from the soaring rhetoric about democracy. But there is another version of democracy. Actually it’s the standard doctrine of progressive, contemporary democratic theory. So I’ll give some illustrative quotes from leading figures – incidentally not figures on the right. These are all good Woodrow Wilson-FDR-Kennedy liberals, mainstream ones in fact. So according to this version of democracy, “the public are ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. They have to be put in their place. Decisions must be in the hands of an intelligent minority of responsible men, who have to be protected from the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd”. The herd has a function, as it’s called. They’re supposed to lend their weight every few years, to a choice among the responsible men. But apart from that, their function is to be “spectators, not participants in action” – and it’s for their own good. Because as the founder of liberal political science pointed out, we should not succumb to “democratic dogmatisms about people being the best judges of their own interest”. They’re not. We’re the best judges, so it would be irresponsible to let them make choices just as it would be irresponsible to let a three-year-old run into the street.
Well, another important feature of RECD is that the public must be kept in the dark about what is happening to them. The “herd” must remain “bewildered”. The reasons were explained lucidly by the professor of the science of government at Harvard – that’s the official name – another respected liberal figure, Samuel Huntington. As he pointed out, “power remains strong when it remains in the dark. Exposed to sunlight, it begins to evaporate”. Bradley Manning is facing a life in prison for failure to comprehend this scientific principle. Now Edward Snowden as well. And it works pretty well.
The role of the PR industry in elections is explicitly to undermine the school-child version of democracy. What you learn in school is that democracies are based on informed voters making rational decisions. All you have to do is take a look at an electoral campaign run by the PR industry and see that the purpose is to create uninformed voters who will make irrational decisions. For the PR industry that’s a very easy transition from their primary function. Their primary function is commercial advertising. Commercial advertising is designed to undermine markets. If you took an economics course you learned that markets are based on informed consumers making rational choices. If you turn on the TV set, you see that ads are designed to create irrational, uninformed consumers making irrational choices. The whole purpose is to undermine markets in the technical sense.
If you go back to the 1960s, banks were banks. If you had some money, you put it in the bank to lend it to somebody to buy a house or start a business, or whatever. Now that’s a very marginal aspect of financial institutions today. They’re mostly devoted to intricate, exotic manipulations with markets.
There is another prevailing mantra, particularly in the academic professions, claiming that governments seek to protect national security. Anyone who has studied international relations theory has heard that. That’s mostly mythology. The governments seek to extend power and domination and to benefit their primary domestic constituencies – in the U.S., primarily the corporate sector.
Take the marathon bombing in Boston a couple of months ago, that you all read about. You probably didn’t read about the fact that two days after the marathon bombing there was a drone bombing in Yemen. Usually we don’t happen to hear much about drone bombings. They just go on – just straight terror operations which the media aren’t interested in because we don’t care about international terrorism as long as the victims are somebody else. But this one we happened to know about by accident. There was a young man from the village that was attacked who was in the United States and he happened to testify before Congress. He testified about it. He said that for several years, the jihadi elements in Yemen had been trying to turn the village against Americans, get them to hate Americans. But the villagers didn’t accept it because the only thing they knew about the United States was what he told them. And he liked the United States. So he was telling them it was a great place. So the jihadi efforts didn’t work. Then he said one drone attack has turned the entire village into people who hate America and want to destroy it. They killed a man who everybody knew and they could have easily apprehended if they’d wanted. But in our international terror campaigns we don’t worry about that and we don’t worry about security.
So that was the offer: the Russians withdraw missiles from Cuba; the U.S. publicly withdraw obsolete missiles that it’s already withdrawing from Turkey, which of course are a much greater threat to Russia than the missiles were in Cuba.
Kennedy refused. That’s probably the most horrendous decision in human history, in my opinion. He was taking a huge risk of destroying the world in order to establish a principle: the principle is that we have the right to threaten anyone with destruction anyway we like, but it’s a unilateral right. And no one may threaten us, even to try to deter a planned invasion
Going on ten years, Ronald Reagan’s in office. His administration decided to probe Russian defenses by simulating air and naval attacks – air attacks into Russia and naval attacks on its border. Naturally this caused considerable alarm in Russia, which unlike the United States is quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. We have newly released archives that tell us how dangerous it was – much more dangerous than historians had assumed. There’s a current CIA study that just came out. It’s entitled “The War Scare Was for Real”. It was close to nuclear war. It concludes that U.S. intelligence underestimated the threat of a Russian preventative strike, nuclear strike, fearing that the U.S. was attacking them. The most recent issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies – one of the main journals – writes that this almost became a prelude to a preventative nuclear strike. And it continues. I won’t go through details, but the Bin Laden assassination is a recent one.
It could be argued that it’s the most dangerous, craziest government in the world, and the worst government. It’s probably true. But if we want to reduce the threats instead of march blindly in unison, there are a few things to consider. One of them is that the current crisis began with U.S.-South Korean war games, which included for the first time ever a simulation of a preemptive attack in an all-out war scenario against North Korea. Part of these exercises were simulated nuclear bombings on the borders of North Korea. That brings up some memories for the North Korean leadership. For example, they can remember that 60 years ago there was a superpower that virtually leveled the entire country and when there was nothing left to bomb, the United States turned to bombing dams. Some of you may recall that you could get the death penalty for that at Nuremberg. It’s a war crime.
U.S. must retain the right of first strike, even against non-nuclear states; furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be available, at the ready, because they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict”. They frighten adversaries. So they’re constantly being used, just as if you’re using a gun, going into a store pointing a gun at the store owner. You don’t fire it, but you’re using the gun. STRATCOM goes on to say planners should not be too rational in determining what the opponent values the most. All of it has to be targeted. “It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. That the United States may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona that we project.” It’s beneficial for our strategic posture “if some elements appear to be potentially out-of-control”. That’s not Richard Nixon or George W. Bush; it’s Bill Clinton.
What is the threat? We know the answer from the highest level: the U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon provide estimates to Congress every year. You can read them. The Global Security Analysis – they of course review this. And they say the main threat of a Iranian nuclear program – if they’re developing weapons, they don’t know. But they say if they’re developing weapons, they would be part of their deterrent strategy. The U.S. can’t accept that. A state that claims the right to use force and violence anywhere and whenever it wants, cannot accept a deterrent. So they’re a threat. That’s the threat.
チョムスキーってのはアメリカの評論としては面白いですね。
この記事は、ドイツでの講演の記録のようですが、アメリカは衰えてきているものの、相対的にはいまだに、強大な権力をもっており、その力は危険である、と。
アメリカってのは、共和党と民主党と二大政党があるように思うが、実は大企業のための政党の派閥があるだけなんだ、と。で、最近はリベラルがいなくなってしまって、共和党と共和党穏健派があるだけで、今の状況と比べると、ニクソンさえも、左で、アイゼンハワーなんて左寄りすぎて、左右の測りに収まらない、と。
ーーー日本のこと右傾化だ、右傾化だ、と言っているが、本当のところは自分のところが、右傾化しているんですけど、主流のメディアはそういったことには盲目なわけです。 軍事に関する考え方からすると、日本の極右がアメリカの左と同じくらいじゃないかな、というのが私見です。
で、政治体制からすると、アメリカは民主主義とか言われているけど、民衆の意見が政策に反映されておらず、ケネディーとかのリベラルひとさえ、エリート主義で、民衆はエリートの決定に従っていればよく、また、政府のことについては知らしむべからず、主義である、と。
ーーーこのリベラルでもエリート主義の上から目線というのは、いまの、駐日アメリカ大使のケネディーさんなんかに強くあらわれていますね。それはともかく、
広告宣伝が行き届いて、国民は政治的にも経済的にも合理的は判断ができないようになっている、と。
で、政府は安全保障という重大な役割を果たしているように思っている人がいるが、しかし、無人機で市民を殺せば、地域の人はアメリカの敵になるだけで、テロリストをアメリカ自身の行いで増やしているのだ、と。アメリカのメディアというのは自国民が被害者でない限り、こうしたアメリカの犯罪については、報道しないのだ、と。
キューバ危機などのときの例を挙げて、一つ前の記事で言っていたのと同じことを言っています。つまり、アメリカは、どんな国でも、自分たちの好きなやり方で、侵害、脅迫する権利があるが、その権利は一方的なものであって、他の国は、侵略されることがわかっていて、そのための防衛のためであっても、アメリカに脅威を与えることは許されないーーーそれがアメリカのやりかたなわけですね。
北朝鮮なんかは自分たちの国民に対して滅茶苦茶ひどいことをする国ですけど、しかし、アメリカとの関係では、米韓が挑発するときに、反応するだけであり、朝鮮戦争のときにもう爆撃する場所がないというところまで、爆撃しつくされているので、そのように反応してしまう、というのは理由がないわけではない、と。因みに、アメリカの北朝鮮での行状は戦争犯罪である、と。
核兵器にかんしていうと、撃たないけど、スーパーに拳銃をもって、店員に銃口を向けて買い物をするようなもので、アメリカは核兵器をいつでも使えるようにしているのだ、と。
ここらへんの分析というのは、リアリストの人も似たような分析をするのではないでしょうか。
アメリカは核兵器廃絶なんて絶対に考えていない。
例えば、中国が核兵器を放棄しても、アメリカが放棄するわけでもない。
別にアメリカだから、というより、国家は、身の安全のために、できる範囲で、軍事的にちょっとでも他国に優位にたとうとするわけです。
だから、日本が通常兵器を放棄したら、中国も放棄するか、というとそういうことにはならないわけです。
戦争の兵器なんか、馬鹿らしい道具ですけど、軍縮というのは、対等な、あるいは、対等に近い武力のあるもの同士が、透明性を確保した上で、一斉の声でやらなくては意味がない。
平和とか、兵器削減という目的はすばらしいが、そうした現実を踏まえなければ、そうした目的も達成できない、と思うのであります。
因みに、アメリカは、靖国参拝で、中国を挑発するな、といいますけど、当のアメリカはロシアは挑発するわ、北朝鮮は挑発するわ、中国は挑発するわ、と挑発しまくっているのであります。
別に反米に走る必要はないですけど、ソフトパワーのせいだか、あるいは、権力にあこがれるのかわかりませんけど、ただたんにアメリカを崇拝しているのもいかがなものか、と思うのであります。
もう一つ、日本に来て、アメリカでは！と得意げに話し、日本人に日本のことを説教している輩というのは、チョムスキーも知らず、アメリカを知らない、日本でいうと、産経の素朴な読者みたいなひとなのかもしれません。
