Gość: Stop Wojnie
IP: *.warszawa.sdi.tpnet.pl
23.03.03, 19:59
Noam Chomsky: The [peace] demonstrations were another indication of a quite
remarkable phenomenon. There is around the world and in the United States
opposition to the coming war that is at a level that is completely
unprecedented in US or European history both in scope and the parts of the
population it draws on.
There's never been a time that I can think of when there's been such massive
opposition to a war before it was even started. And the closer you get to the
region, the higher the opposition appears to be. In Turkey, polls indicated
close to 90% opposition, in Europe it's quite substantial, and in the United
States the figures you see in polls, however, are quite misleading because
there's another factor that isn't considered that differentiates the United
States from the rest of the world. This is the only country where Saddam
Hussein is not only reviled and despised but also feared, so since September
polls have shown that something like 60-70% of the population literally think
that Saddam Hussein is an imminent threat to their survival.
Now there's no objective reason why the US should be more frightened of
Saddam than say the Kuwaitis, but there is a reason - namely that since
September there's been a drumbeat of propaganda trying to bludgeon people
into the belief that not only is Saddam a terrible person but in fact he's
going to come after us tomorrow unless we stop him today. And that reaches
people. So if you want to understand the actual opposition to the war in the
US you have to extract that factor. The factor of completely irrational fear
created by massive propaganda, and if you did I think you'd find it's much
like everywhere else.
What is not pointed out in the press coverage is that there is simply no
precedent, or anything like a precedent, for this kind of public opposition
to a war. And it extends itself far more broadly, it's not just opposition to
war it's a lack of faith in the leaderships. You may have seen a study
released by the world economic forum a couple of days ago which estimated
trust in leaders, and the lowest was in leaders of the United States. Trusted
by little over quarter of the population, and I think that reflects concerns
over the adventurism and violence and the threats that are perceived in the
actions and plans of the current administration.
These are things that ought to be central. Even in the United States there is
overwhelming opposition to the war and that corresponding decline in trust in
the leadership that is driving the war. This has been developing for some
time but it is now reaching an unusual state, and, just to get back to the
demonstrations over the weekend, that's never happened before. If you compare
it with the Vietnam war, the current stage of the war with Iraq is
approximately like that of 1961 - that is, before the war actually was
launched, as it was in 1962 with the US bombing of South Vietnam and driving
millions of people into concentration camps and chemical warfare and so on,
but there was no protest. In fact, so little protest that few people even
remember.
The protests didn't begin to develop until several years later when large
parts of south Vietnam were being subjected to saturation bombing by B-52s,
hundreds of thousands of troops where there, hundreds of thousands had been
killed, and then even after that, when the protests finally did develop in
the US and Europe it was mostly focused on a side-issue - the bombing of
north Vietnam which was undoubtedly a crime, it was far more intense in the
south which was always the US target, and that's continued.
It's also, incidentally, recognised by the government. So when any
administration comes into office the first thing it does is have a worldwide
intelligence assessment - "What's the state of the world?" - provided by the
intelligence services. These are secret and you learn about them 30 or 40
years later when they're declassified. When the first Bush administration
came in 1989 parts of their intelligence assessment were leaked, and they're
very revealing about what happened in the subsequent 10 years about precisely
these questions.
The parts that were leaked said that it was about military confrontations
with much weaker enemies, recognising they were the only kind we were going
to be willing to face, or even exist. So in confrontations with much weaker
enemies the United States must win "decisively and rapidly" because otherwise
popular support will erode, because it's understood to be very thin. Not like
the 1960s when the government could fight a long, brutal war for years and
years practically destroying a country without any protest. Not now. Now they
have to win. They have to terrify the population to feel there's some
enormous threat to their existence and carry out a mircaculous, decisive and
rapid victory over this enormous foe and march on to the next one.
Remember the people now running the show in Washington are mostly recycled
Reaganites, essentially reliving the script of the 1980s - that's an apt
analogy. And in the 1980s they were imposing domestic programmes which were
quite harmful to the general population and which were unpopular. People
opposed most of their domestic programmes. And the way they succeeded in
ramming it through was by repeatedly keeping the population in a state of
panic.
So one year it was an airbase in Grenada which the Russians were going to use
to bomb the United States. It sounds ludicrous but that was the propaganda
lie and it worked.
Nicaragua was "two days' marching time from Texas" - a dagger pointed at the
heart of Texas, to borrow Hitler's phrase. Again, you'd think the people
would collapse with laughter. But they didn't. That was continually brought
up to frighten us - Nicargua might conquer us on it's way to conquer the
hemisphere. A national emergency was called because of the threat posed to
national security by Nicargua. Libyan hitmen were wandering the streets of
Washington to assassinate our leader - hispanic narco-terrorists. One thing
after another was conjured up to keep the population in a state of constant
fear while they carried out their major terrorist wars.
Remember, the same people declared a war on terror in 1981 that was going to
be the centrepiece of US foreign policy focused primarily on central America,
and they carried out a war on terror in central America where they ended up
killing about 200,000 people, leaving four countries devastated. Since 1990,
when the US took them over again, they've declined still further into deep
poverty. Now they're doing the same thing for the same purposes - they are
carrying out domestic programmes to which the population is strongly opposed
because they're being harmed by them.
But the international adventurism, the conjuring up of enemies that are about
to destroy us, that's second nature, very familiar. They didn't invent it,
others have done the same thing, others have done it in history but they
became masters of this art and are now doing it again.
I don't want to suggest that they have no reasons for wanting to take over
Iraq. Of course they do - long-standing reasons that everyone knows.
Controlling Iraq will put the US in a very powerful position to extend it
domination of the major energy resources of the world. That's not a small
point.
But look at the specific timing. It's rather striking that the propaganda
drumbeat began in September - what happened in September? Well, it's when the
Congressional campaign began and it was certain that the Republicans were not
going to win it by allowing social and economic issues to dominate. They
would have been smashed. They had to do exactly what they did in the '80s.
Replace them by security issues and in the case
