Transcription
Uh, I want to thank you for joining us again, and we do have some questions for you if you're ready to get started. Unless you want to say something or introduce yourself. Let's go ahead and do you want to talk a little bit about the Cambodian numbers and the media reporting and, uh, can you just speak on that for a little bit?
Uh, my colleague, uh, Ed Herman, passed away recently. Did a very detailed review of, uh, what was known about Cambodia and the coverage of Cambodia. Uh, uh, what we said, pointed out was, we are drawing no conclusions about the facts. We are asking how the facts available were transmitted through the media filter. So we compared the facts that were known, what was reported, asked about what we were interested in, how the reports reflected what was known.
Uh, actually, this was one of two studies paired in the same volumes. One was the study of Cambodia. The other was the study of East Timor. Very close comparison. Same area of the world. Roughly the same period, about the same level of destruction. One fundamental difference: in the case of Cambodia, you could attribute it to an enemy. In the case of East Timor, we were responsible. That was the fundamental difference. So we took both cases, applied the same approach, look at the facts available, look at the interpretation and coverage. What do we conclude? Well, what we showed, uh, I think definitively is that in the case of Cambodia, in case of both East Timor and Cambodia, there was enormous lying and deception, but in opposite directions. In the case of Cambodia, it was to radically inflate the charges against the official enemy, uh, total, often total fabrications, and nobody cared, even when they were exposed. Case of East Timor, the opposite: deny the facts, stop, don't even, don't even do reporting, pretend that nothing's going on. Well, of these two cases, East Timor was obviously far more important for a very simple reason. In the case of Cambodia, there's nothing anybody could do about it. Nobody pretended you could. Case of East Timor, you could do everything about it. You could call off the crimes and atrocities because we were responsible for them. So therefore, that's morally far more significant.
Well, as far as I know, there's no correction to be made in either of these two chapters, paired chapters. In fact, we had them reprinted years later without even changing a comma because I couldn't. There's been, but it's, but the reaction is quite interesting. Huge anger and protest about Cambodia, silence about East Timor. That again supports the basic principle, basic model we're talking about: the completely remarkable subservience of not only the media, but also the general intellectual community, their subservience to state power. Uh, it's not Russia, but it's not all that different. Uh, this shows it very clearly. Talk about the details if you like. But as I say, there's, I don't see anything to say about them. To the extent that we took any position on Cambodia, if you look practically, none. It was simply to suggest that US intelligence is probably the best source, which all analysts agreed was correct. So we reported US intelligence, which was not reported in the media because it wasn't inflated enough. What US intelligence said was, we don't know a lot, but it looks as though it's not genocide. It's just rapid, sudden change, uh, which is causing immense disruption, and in fact, a lot of it was caused by the virtual destruction of Cambodia in the years before the Khmer Rouge by US bombing, which was taken under the principle announced by Henry Kissinger. Uh, the directive that he gave to the US Air Force was, "Massive air war against Cambodia. Everything that anything that flies against anything that moves." I don't think there's a call for genocide like that in the archival record. Nobody cared. Huge destruction. Basically created the Khmer Rouge. They were a small guerrilla group before they started. But the massive bombing of rural Cambodia created an angry, vast peasant-based, uh, resistance movement which took revenge in later years. That part's not talked about either. So it all fits the same pattern. The most, I think it's a very dramatic case of how, of the subservience of the educated sectors to state propaganda, uh, dramatic, right up to the present. As is the fact, I'm not criticizing you, but the fact that you ask about Cambodia, but you don't ask about East Timor. How could you? It's been suppressed. We suppress our own crimes. We talk about enemy crimes.
Thank you, Dr. Chomsky. I was wondering what is your personal opinion on the, uh, situation going on with TikTok right now and social media in general?
Well, the, the effort to suppress TikTok and the, is I think just part of the general anti-China hysteria. The US is acting very provocatively. In the case of China, it's very dangerous. Could lead to a major conflict, even a terminal conflict. And TikTok is one of the small examples of this. As to the TikTok phenomenon in the United States, I'm sure you know a lot better than I do. I don't watch it. There was an interesting study that came out a couple of weeks ago which analyzed the Generation Z, you know, kids born basically after 1997. That generation has experienced, but the results that came out were that about 4%, 4% looked at newspapers, about 4%, % looked at TV news. Most didn't bother much with Facebook. That's not cool enough. Almost all got their information about the world from TikTok and and Instagram. Well, you can check that out better than I can, but that was the result of the study. You use TikTok, so you can tell what kind of picture of the world comes out from that.
Uh, I watched a debate that you did with William Buckley in 1970, I believe, and you discussed a lot of ideas that he and other people would consider to be unpatriotic. What are some challenges that you've had with talking about some of the bad things that America has done? And how have you noticed that, like, the reaction to that has changed from 1970 to now?
Let me ask you another question. It's a good one to think about. Suppose you were in Russia and you were criticizing Russian crimes. How do you think the rea, what do you think the reaction would be? Don't have to tell you. In fact, that's historically true. You look back at the whole history of the world. Let's go back to classical antiquity, the Bible. There were people who were critics, like Socrates in Athens. He was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens by asking critical questions. That's Athens. What about the Bible? Sure, you've all studied the Bible. There's a group of people called prophets. Uh, they weren't prophets. That's a bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word. They were basically dissident intellectuals. There were people who were criticizing the king, the king's crimes, uh, warning about the dangers that the king's policies were going to cause, calling for mercy to widow, widows and orphans. That's basically what we call dissident intellectuals. How were they treated? Were they treated nicely? They were imprisoned, driven into the desert, bitterly denounced. There were people who were honored at the time. Centuries later, they were called false prophets. Actually, Jesus was one of them. He was a radical critic of power. Was he treated nicely? Not according to what I've read. Uh, this runs right through history. And that's the answer to your question. Criticize the pieties of the powerful. They're not going to like it. They'll launch criticisms. You take the prophets again. U Elijah, major prophet, was condemned by King Ahab. You may recall Ahab is the epitome of evil in the Bible. King Ahab called Elijah to him and asked him, "Why are you a hater of Israel? Why are you unpatriotic? Cuz you're daring to criticize the king and his crimes." Is that any different from what you're describing now? Not really. Runs through all of history.
So, Dr. Chomsky, do you think that understanding of what is patriotic or not is getting better with, uh, people that speak against crimes, or is it staying the same, getting worse?
I think it's getting better if you go back. I mean, I look at things because of my age over a longer stretch. So you go back to the 1960s. Uh, President Kennedy in the early '60s sharply escalated the war against Viet, Indochina, turned into a murderous war against all of Indochina. Millions of people killed, countries destroyed. Kennedy sharply escalated it. Uh, started authorizing US planes to bomb South Vietnamese rural population. Uh, instituted chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. Started major programs to drive the rural population into basically concentration camps. Um, the claim was to protect them from the guerrillas who US intelligence knew they were supporting, uh, authorizing a bomb. You could barely get two people in a room together to talk about it. We're doing it, must be right. You know, it took years before you could get any protest started. Couldn't have public. I was in Boston, probably the most liberal city in the country. We couldn't have public demonstrations because they'd be broken up by violence by students, often. Uh, had a meeting in a church. Church would get attacked. They couldn't criticize our war, which was destroying South Vietnam. Later, all of Indochina. Well, it changed. It's very different now. By the late '60s, a substantial popular movement had to develop. By now, it's much more free. So, there's improvements over time, not anywhere near enough, but significant. And incidentally, to just add something, the improvements didn't come by magic. They weren't gifts. They were the result of mostly young people, people roughly your age, who took very courageous and difficult stands and suffered for it. Many of them ended up in prison, but they did manage to bring about a substantial change in many topics, not just opposition to the war. Take something like women's rights. Didn't exist in the 1960s, became a major issue. Not enough, but significant through the activities of mostly young people, firstly young women and others who joined them. Made a big difference. It's happened in a lot of areas. Some lessons there.
So, as a segue to talking about Cambodia versus East Timor, you kind of said that we really highlighted official enemies' crimes and we kind of watered down or just omitted our own. Is any of that happening now? Are there some current interventions that the general public doesn't quite know about or know the scale about?
No, it happens right in front of your eyes. The, take the discussion of Ukraine. It's a brutal invasion. No question about that. A major war. But look at the rhetoric about it. Uh, President Biden, leading figures and intellectuals give pompous declarations about how we cannot calibrate, uh, violations of the UN Charter. Can't tolerate the idea that one country can attack another and get away with it. The worst crime in history. Did you ever hear of another act of aggression? Well, there was, when we're now coming to its 20th anniversary, the invasion of Iraq, much worse than the invasion of Ukraine. Far worse. How is it described in the United States? As the liberation of Iraq. The destruction, uh, massacre, slaughter, devastation of the country. It's called the liberation of Iraq. That's the way in Moscow University they'd call the invasion of Ukraine. In fact, it's worse than that. We are now celebrating, celebrating some of the worst atrocities of the Iraq war. You don't read about it because we don't talk about our own crimes, but one of the worst atrocities was the assault on the city of Fallujah. One of the most beautiful cities in, in Iraq. US attacked it, destroyed it, killed thousands of people, used weapons, depleted uranium, white phosphorus, other weapons which cause cancer that lasts for generations. People are still massively dying of cancer. How are we reacting? The US Navy just commissioned its most recent assault vessel. What did they name it? The USS Fallujah, in memory of the worst, in honor of the one of the greatest atrocities of the war in Iraq. Did you read about it anywhere? I doubt it. You look to the foreign press, you can read about it. But, uh, so yes, we see this right in front of our eyes constantly.
Let's say we have, uh, some proponents or people that are maybe even ignorant to the war. Maybe they have, um, family members that served in Iraq or Afghanistan. How do you reach them with these tough truths of, you know, death counts and atrocities?
Definitely, they reach themselves. There's a very good, very strong movement of Iraqi veterans against the war. You don't hear much about them because what they say is the wrong thing. But these are Iraqi veterans who get together, try to bring to the general population the knowledge of the atrocities that they carried out, that they themselves carried out and were involved in, giving personal testimonies, talking about the bitter effects on American veterans, plenty of them in VA hospitals where they don't get decent treatment. Uh, so yes, they're trying hard. Same with Vietnam. Vietnam Veterans Against the War played a very important role in informing the public about the crimes and horrors that were going on there that they themselves participated in, and it did break through to some extent. But these are not popular topics, uh, just as they've never, through history, power systems, uh, honor the false prophets, not the true prophets.
Do you think that ChatGPT is good?
That's an important question. There are really two questions. One, there's, you read the press, there's the commentators, intellectuals, it's called a huge new era. We're entering a new era. The leading correspondent of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, wrote an article about, we're entering a Promethean era, new era of discovery, understanding. It'll put all the past behind us. Well, they're basically two questions. One is a question about science, one a question about engineering. They're different. Can one question, can these systems contribute anything to science? Can they teach us anything about language, about learning, about human cognition, and so on? The answer to that is flat no. They are designed in principle so they can teach us nothing. They get better at doing what they're doing. It'll bring out this fundamental flaw more evidently. So that's the science part. Then comes the engineering. And here's where your question arises. Like any engineering achievement, a hammer, a bulldozer, then nuclear energy, chatbots, whatever it is, you can ask, is it useful? Is it harmful? The technology doesn't care. Take a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether a torturer uses it to beat somebody's head in or whether a carpenter uses it to build a house. It's the same with every other technology. So, what about these things? Well, we know they have a lot of harm. That's already been demonstrated. They're ter, and it's barely beginning. They're terrific techniques for disinformation, defamation. It's already been tried a little bit. I don't know if you saw the caricatures of the Pope. It's pretty easy with modern technology to put together chatbot, uh, visual manipulation, voice manipulation, and put, put together a simulation of you that looks very real saying some horrible, idiotic thing. It's easily possible. So there's going to be plenty of that and a ton of disinformation, especially as soon as big states and other big power centers become involved. Uh, one of the worst parts is it preys on human gullibility. People tend to think that these things are real. They start asking them questions. Should I leave my wife? Should I change my job? They get back some totally ludicrous answer and they follow it. There are cases on, plenty of cases on record already. I mean, there are even people who do that with things like, uh, Alexa, you know, ask it questions, somehow thinking somehow it's real, it's or R2-D2, you know, a little cute little robot who answers your questions. That's very dangerous. Um, there are other dangers. Plagiarism, for example. I mean, basically, chatbot is high-tech plagiarism. It's just scanning tons of material and sort of duplicating something like what's there, but it can very easily be used for students who want to fake their way out of courses and so on. But that's a, I think that's one of the minor dangers. Uh, there are other ways to deal with that, like make the courses interesting. So nobody wants to fake their way out of it. That's the answer to that. But, uh, uh, if you have a stupid course that you're not interested in, why shouldn't you fake your way out of it? But, uh, the, but there might, these dangers are quite real. As you probably know, about a couple of thousand of the major workers in AI have recently called for a moratorium on their development because they're afraid of the negative consequences. There are some useful consequences, like these things have tremendous computer capacity, search capacity, and they've been used to solve some real problems. Like, it's, there's a major problem in biology about how proteins fold. You know, the DNA provides information that causes proteins to take a particular shape, and the problem of working out how they do it has been a very hard one. There's just a lot of computing involved, and the computing capacity of the systems has helped resolve that problem. So, like I say, technology can be valuable, can be harmful. It's up to the communities to control the technology, to decide which way it'll go.
What is your opinion on the use, especially in America, of standardized tests like the SATs and as that being used as a baseline for intelligence in America and whether that's good or bad?
That's a perfect way to dumb down the population and to ensure that everyone's totally ignorant and has no intellectual capacity, and it's designed for that purpose. Uh, these are things that were ridiculed in the 18th century, in the Enlightenment. They were compared with pouring water into a vessel and letting a little of it drip out. Uh, every one of us, I'm sure you certainly, me, uh, have had courses where you weren't interested, didn't see any point in them, and, uh, maybe the last couple of weeks you study for the exam. The teaching to the test system makes sure that nobody thinks, that nobody has any, pursues their interests. I mean, I've talked to teachers who, a sixth-grade teacher, I'll told say, a kid came up to me in class after a class and said, "You know, they're really interested in something you brought up. What can I do to look into it more?" And the teacher has to tell the kid, "Can't do that. You're not allowed to pursue your interest. You have to study for this test that's coming up because that's going to determine whether you can go on to college." Also, whether I have a salary because I have to make sure that everyone passes the test. So, you can't look at what you're interested in. It's the exact opposite of education. Frankly, I think it was designed for that purpose. The whole neoliberal movement that started in the last 40 years is basically an attack on the population. It's trying to break down the social order, make people passive, obedient, and so on. One of the best ways to do it is to make sure they don't think. Well, how do you make sure they don't think? By setting up an educational system that is designed to prevent thinking, like teaching to the test. Bipartisan, incidentally, Bush, Obama, and you've experienced it, so you can tell better than I can, but that's, uh, basically what it is.
Can you kind of tell us about, uh, maybe some solutions in education, like maybe from your education at the Deweyite school?
Well, there was a tradition in the United States, a very powerful tradition. I was lucky enough as a kid to be in a school that was part of it, of what was called progressive education. I was doing exactly the opposite of the teach for exam. I mean, I was in the school from nursery school up until high school. We didn't even know who was a student. There wasn't any such concept, literally. I mean, I was skipped a year, but nobody paid any attention. Just meant that I was in a class with bigger kids. Uh, wasn't until I got to high school, academic high school, which ran on traditional grounds, that I suddenly discovered I was supposed to be a good student. Everybody was encouraged to do their best, work together, cooperative projects, follow your own interests. Of course, there was a curriculum, so you studied courses that were laid out, but it was done in a way to encourage your critical thinking and inquiry and questioning and so on. It's perfectly possible. Can do it from kindergarten right through graduate school. And in fact, in the best graduate schools, that's exactly what's done. So, I spent most of my academic life at MIT, a great science engineering school. We didn't have tests in graduate schools. Uh, I mean, maybe got the student to write an individual paper or something. There were no grades, pass, fail, that's all. Um, the idea was to try to encourage critical discussion. Um, if students raise criticisms in class, okay, you might pursue that and abandon the lesson plan. Uh, that's the way you learn things. Uh, some of the, actually, one of my colleagues, a friend who is a Nobel laureate in biology, described the way he taught his classes, graduate classes or undergraduate classes. He wouldn't prepare the lecture. There was a topic for the day. They had readings, but he wouldn't prepare the lectures. He would just talk about what he thought ought to be the way things work, judging by his understanding of biology. And the task for the class was to find out if he was right. That's the way to teach. I've had classes like that.
You've seen how we've progressed with schooling and media and all of society as a whole. Do you think that, what do you think we need to make significant changes for the better? And do you think we're capable of that in, like, the near future, in the next few generations?
Just look at history, recent history. The country is a lot more civilized than it was 40 years ago. Why? Because people like you made it more civilized. I'm sure. I gave a couple of examples. Opposition to aggression, women's rights, civil rights, uh, environmental issues. Nothing back in the '60s, almost nothing. Now, major topics, not enough done, but a lot of progress. That's how you can make change now. It's not a secret. Just takes hard work. Got to get other people. First of all, try to understand yourself. What, what are the things? What, what are the facts? Bring it to other people. Try to help them get organized. So, take women's rights. How'd that start? Small consciousness-raising groups. Couple of young women would get together and just talk about it. Do we have to live the way our mothers and grandmothers lived, or can we be independent human beings? Then talk to bigger groups and start making organizations, demonstrations, so on. That's the only way on any issue, and there's plenty of opportunities. Um, there's a lot wrong with the country, but it's a very free country by comparative standards. It's very free. No Gestapo is going to come into this classroom and break it up and drag you all away, as happens in other countries. It's increasingly starting to happen in Florida. If you followed what's going on there, it's not that remote. Blocking teaching of American history. Uh, blocking teaching of anything involving gender issues. Uh, just make sure that everybody is conformist, passive, obedient, like a good fascist state. That's exactly what DeSantis is trying to do. It's not that remote. It's happening in other constituencies around the country. Libraries are throwing out books because you're not allowed to read them. Uh, this, it's not fascism, but it's protofascism. So it's not that far away, but you can struggle against it. We have plenty of opportunities. Don't, doesn't make sense to overlook what's happening, and it's having an effect. You take a look at recent polls among Republican voters, more Republicans think it's important to destroy what they call "woke," "wokeism" than think it's important to save Social Security. These are people who live on Social Security, poor rural people. But the main thing in life is to destroy wokeism, whatever that is. I mean, these have big effects.
I wanted to get your advice to history students and then any resources, like maybe websites.
I don't really know of anything. I read the newspapers, look up Truthout, Common Dreams, Al Jazeera, Foreign Press. You can find Democracy Now. You can find a lot of things. You just have to search what grabs your interest. There's no prescription for that. Find out what your interests are. Easy to find on the internet. Pursue them. Keep an open mind. You'll pick up a lot of nonsense, a lot of craziness, but that's what critical intelligence is about. Pick the things that matter, make sense, and go on from there. There's no prescription for that any more than there's a prescription for making somebody a good physicist. You can't do it. You know, just have a critical mind and work on things that are important. Find out what's significant. You can all do it. We all have that capacity.
Thank you, Dr. Chomsky.
Thank you. Good to talk to you.
Take care. [Music]