Chomsky: The Obedient Rise, The Disobedient Fall

The following excerpt is from Anarchy in the USA, an interview Chomsky gave to Charles M Young for Rolling Stone magazine on 28 May 1992.

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QUESTION: Do you ever wonder about the psychology of these American commissars? You've written about the filtering process by which the obedient rise to the top and the disobedient end up elsewhere, but I wonder what goes on in their heads.

CHOMSKY: I don't think it's that hard to figure out. All the people I've ever met, including me, have done bad things in their lives, things that they know they shouldn't have done. There are few people who say, "I really did something rotten." What people usually do is make up a way of explaining why that was the right thing to do. That's pretty much the way belief formation works in general. You have some interest, something you want, and then you make up a belief system which makes that look right and just. And then you believe the belief system. It's a very common human failing.

Some people are better at it than others. The people who are best at it become commissars. It's always best to have columnists who believe what they're saying. Cynics tend to leave clues because they're always trying to get around the lying. So people who are capable of believing what is supportive of power and privilege - but coming at it, in their view, independently - those are the best.

The norm is that if you subordinate yourself to the interests of the powerful, whether it's parent or teacher or anybody else, and if you do it politely and willingly, you'll get ahead. Let's say you're a student in school and the teacher says something about American history and it's so absurd you feel like laughing, I remember this as a child. If you get up and say: "That's really foolish. Nobody could believe that. The facts are the other way around," you're going to get in trouble.

QUESTION: Do you remember the fact you came up with?

CHOMSKY: Well, this happened so often. I got thrown out of classes...not a lot...I don't want to suggest it was any real...there are people who did it constantly, and they end up as behavior problems. You raise too many questions, you ask for reasons instead of just following orders, they put you in certain categories: hyperactive. Undisciplined. Overemotional. It goes all through your education and professional life. A journalist who starts picking on the wrong stories will be called in by the editor and told: "You're losing your objectivity. You're getting a little too emotionally involved in your stories. Why don't you work in the police court until you get it right?"

That does start in childhood. If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

Steve E Jones Paper To Be Published In Science Journal

On 4 April Steven E Jones revealed on his blog that he has had a paper on his 9/11 research peer-reviewed for publication in a mainstream science journal. Whilst I don't know the content of the paper this is nevertheless another major step forward for Jones and the 9/11 Truth movement. Science journals don't deal with "conspiracy theories" (whatever the hell they are), they - like Jones - deal with science and verifiable facts.

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In the same blog post Jones said that, just days after the paper was accepted, he was contacted once again by the "engineer with government contacts". This is the same engineer who told Jones he would lose his job at Brigham University unless he took his earlier paper on 9/11 off the internet. Jones refused, and within days was forced by the university to go on paid leave (he later decided to take early retirement). This time the engineer said, "you may never be able to accept that what I have said is the truth, because accepting this means that you have made many serious technical errors. However, you will have to accept this someday."

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More veiled threats by the man with contacts to the government. Jones says, "What do you think he is referring to, some gov't program such as a "special camp" for those who question the 9/11 story? (j/k, I hope...)" So do we, Dr Jones. After all, those detention camps aren't being built to house no one.

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And finally, Jones once again advises people in the US to get stocked up with enough food and water to last at least three months (preferably a year) in case of some internal state of emergency within the US. This is quite a shocking endictment of how much faith people in the US have in their government. But looking at governmental responses to things like Katrina, the 9/11 first responders, the constitution, liberty, free speech, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan (indeed, you could just fill in the blank), then this endictment isn't so surprising. The threat of martial law is ever present in the US. All it will take is the right spark. A spark the military industrial complex is no doubt baying for.

Joined Up Journalism II

FBI Head Predicts Al-Qaeda Defeat (7 April 2008, BBC)

A week is a long time in the 'war on terror'. The head of the FBI Robert Mueller (speaking in London to an audience which included Johnathon Evans, head of MI5, and Ian Blair, the metropolitan police commissioner) said that the West can achieve victory over Al-Qaeda within three-and-a-half years.

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(One may wonder what this victory might look like on the streets of Britain. Could it be that in three-and-a-half years all the attacks will stop? Could it be that in three-and-a-half years we can do away with all the surveillance measures that our government has brought in in the name of 'terror'; measures which have turned liberty into little more than a thing of memory?)

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Ignoring certain truths about Al-Qaeda and the 'war on terror' for a moment, consider the following story, also from the BBC, and coming less than a week after they reported that an end was in sight in the fight against Al Qaeda.

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Terror Threat To UK 'Is Growing' (13 April 2008, BBC)

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It makes no sense. We are just three-and-a-half years from defeating Al-Qaeda. Then a week later, Al-Qaeda is a growing threat. We're winning the 'war on terror'. And then a week later losing it.

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The BBC doesn't flinch.

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You could perhaps defend the BBC by saying that they were just reporting what they were told. In the first instance by Mueller, and in the second by home secretary Jacqui Smith. But then the BBC is of no use to any of us unless it validates what it is told by making sure it is the truth. If the words don't correspond to the world, they're meaningless.

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This it seems to me is the problem with the BBC. Quite simply: they don't validate what they are told. When a member of government or any kind of official speaks, they all too often report it without question. Even when this unquestionning faith leads to the innate and confusing kind of contradictions that you see in the above stories.

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Around a year-and-a-half ago I wrote to the BBC to ask them why they continued to report that Osama Bin Laden was behind 9/11 when the FBI had said that in the four-and-a-half years since the attacks they had found no "hard evidence" that he was. They said Bin Laden remained the chief suspect because the US government said he was. I asked if they had seen or come across any evidence linking Bin Laden to the attacks. They had not. I found ths astonishing. It really seemed that things like evidence and the truth did not matter, even though Bin Laden's guilt was given as justification to launch military strikes against Afghanistan.

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In the real world, when people continually lie you lose faith in them. You start to treat their assertions with scepticism. This is a very understandable state of affairs.

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So when General David Patraeus told the BBC in March that Iran was "behind Green Zone attack" in Iraq, you might expect a degree of caution on the BBC's part. Is there evidence? According to Patraeus, there is. Did the BBC ask what this evidence was? No. Instead we learn that Patraeus "thought Tehran had trained, equipped and funded insurgents who fired the barrage of mortars and rockets."

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The BBC continues to report and relay what these people say without question or investigation, no matter how contradictory, dubious or downright false what they say is. And they are carrying the Iran war propoganda with the same regard for truth as when they carried the Iraq propoganda. That is, with no regard at all.

David Lynch: Explaining His Thesis Of The Role New Mobile Phone Technology Has Played In The Advancement Of Cinema

The Gulf of Tonkin: "It didn't happen."

The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred on 4nd August 1964. On that day the US Maddox, a naval destroyer, was said to have been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats whilst carrying out missions in the Gulf of Tonkin. The media lept on the story that the communist Vietnamese had attacked a US vessel. And on the basis of the attack the US Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. This resolution gave president Lindon Johnson the power to go to war without an official 'declaration' of war. Thus the president was able esculate military operations in Vietnam without recourse to Congress, something hitherto demanded by the constitution. In the end these operations would last for more than a decade and would bring about the deaths of over 50,000 US soldiers and between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 Vietnamese citizens. The trigger for the Vietnam conflict, the incident that was used as its justification, was the one that occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin on the 4th August 1964.

But the simple fact is that there was no such incident. The Maddox was attacked by nothing at all on 4th August 1964. Robert McNamara the then Secretary of Defence and someone who played a central role in selling this lie to Congress and the American public later admited, "It did not happen." The truth is that the Gulf of Tonkin story was a top to bottom fabrication used to coerce Congress and the American public into accepting the Vietnam conflict. It succeeded.

It's a precedent we are all familiar with. Lies being used to justify whatever military action our government wishes to carry out. Britain attacked Afghanistan on the basis of Bin Laden's involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Yet we have not seen a shred of evidence linking Bin Laden to the attack; not to mention the fact that Bin Laden and 16 of the 19 alledged 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, not Afghans. Then there's Iraq, which Britain attacked because of the lie that it posed a threat to us.

You may remember a few months ago there was an incident in the Strait of Hormuz close to Iran where the US accused Iranian ships of harrassing and provoking three US Navy ships. This incident occured just a month after the US National Intelligence Estimate revealed that Iran's nuclear programme - which was being touted as justification for a US attack on Iran - had been suspended four years earlier. The parallels between this much exadjurated incident and the Gulf of Tonkin are striking. Both were staged events intended to pull the wool over the eyes of the people in the cause of governmental war mongering.

Next time you hear in the press that Iran or Syria or whoever else has attacked the West, remember the Gulf of Tonkin.