NOAM CHOMSKY seems to lead a double life.

As a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he practically invented the field of
modern linguistics, but outside the academy he’s drawn more attention as a
trenchant critic of U.S. foreign policy and the media.

At seventy-four, Chomsky is “one of the radical heroes of our age,” according to

the Guardian. His activism spans five decades, and the Village Voice compares
him to “a medic attempting to cure a national epidemic of selective amnesia.”
The mainstream U.S. media studiously ignore him, but he is frequently quoted in
the international press, making him better-known abroad than he is at home.
Though not a particularly arresting or charismatic orator, Chomsky invariably
attracts overflow audiences from New York City to New Delhi. His speaking
engagements are booked years in advance. At the January 2003 World Social
Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, some twenty thousand activists, workers, and
trade unionists packed a stadium to hear him. Six months later, I saw him lead
seminars for small groups of students at the Z Media Institute in Woods Hole,
Massachusetts. The number of attendees did not affect his delivery: he is always
patient and composed, with a dry sense of humor that often goes unnoticed amid
the torrent of facts.

My relationship with Chomsky began more than twenty years ago when, after
reading one of his books, I wrote him a letter. I was surprised to get a reply.
Letter followed letter, and a friendship developed. Since 1984 I have been
interviewing Chomsky as part of my Alternative Radioprogram. A series of books
we have done together have sold many thousands of copies, despite having
almost no promotion. Our latest is Propaganda and the Public Mind (South End
Press).

Chomsky has written scores of books himself, and, according to the Arts and
Humanities Citation Index, he is among the ten most cited authors, living or dead,
right behind Plato and Freud. His most recent titles are Middle East
Illusions (Rowman & Littlefield) and Power and Terror (Seven Stories Press). His
book 9-11 (Seven Stories Press) spent seven weeks on the New York
Times extended bestseller list. The hardcover Hegemony or Survival: America’s
Quest for Global Domination is due out in November 2004 from Metropolitan
Books.

People often ask me, “What’s Chomsky like?” I’ve always found the Philadelphia
native to be straightforward, soft-spoken, and unpretentious. There is no power
trip or air of superiority. His approach is best summed up by something he once
said to me: “I’m really not interested in persuading people. What I like to do is
help people persuade themselves.”
I caught up with Chomsky last April 5, in Boulder, Colorado, where he was
helping celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of KGNU community radio. We
conducted the following interview a few hours before his sold-out talk that
evening. Ever generous with his time, he was bound for LA the next morning to
do another benefit. As we spoke, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was underway, and
coalition forces were pushing toward Baghdad. I attempted to bring together
Chomsky the linguistics professor and Chomsky the media critic by asking him
about language used by the government, and subsequently adopted by the
media, to influence public opinion during the war.

Barsamian: What sort of propaganda is at work today with Operation Iraqi

Freedom?

Chomsky: In this morning’s New York Times there’s an interesting article about
Karl Rove, the president’s manager — his “minder” is what they would call it in
Iraq — the one who teaches him what to say and do in order to look good and get
reelected. Rove is not directly involved in planning the war — but then, neither is
Bush. That’s in the hands of other people. Rove says his goal is to present the
president as a powerful wartime leader so that the Republicans can push through
their domestic agenda, which means tax cuts for the rich and other programs
designed to benefit an extremely small, highly privileged sector of the population.
(Rove says it’s to benefit the economy.)

More significant than that — and this part is not outlined in the article — is the
attempt to destroy social support systems like schools and Social Security and
anything based on the concept that people must have some concern for one
another. That idea has to be driven out of people’s minds: that you should have
sympathy and solidarity; that you should care whether the disabled widow across
town is able to eat. The problem with things like schools or Social Security is that
they are based on natural human concern for others. Driving such thoughts from
people’s minds is a large part of the Republican domestic agenda. The best strategy
for this is to produce citizens who are focused solely on maximizing their own
consumption and have no concern for anyone else.

Since people aren’t going to accept total self-interest at face value, however, the
way to achieve it — and this is stated explicitly in the Times article — is to make
people afraid. If people are frightened, if they think that their security is threatened,
they will suppress their own concerns and interests and gravitate toward strong
leaders. They will trust the Republicans to protect them from outside enemies.
Meanwhile the Republicans will drive through their domestic agenda, maybe even
institutionalize it, so that it will be very hard to take apart. And they will do this by
presenting the president as a powerful wartime leader overcoming an awesome foe.
In reality, of course, Iraq is chosen precisely because it is not awesome and can be
easily crushed.
This strategy is laid out pretty overtly in today’s Times — not in precisely the
same words I just used, but the message is very clear. And it’s aimed at the next
presidential election. That’s a large part of this war.

Barsamian: Clearly, on the subject of the Iraq war, there is a huge gap between
U.S. public opinion and opinion in the rest of the world. Do you attribute that to
propaganda?

Chomsky: No question about it. The public-relations campaign against Iraq took
off last September. This is so obvious it’s even been discussed in mainstream
publications. For example, Martin Sieff, the chief political analyst for United Press
International, wrote a long article describing how it was done.

In September 2002, which happened to be the opening of the midterm

Congressional election, the wartime drumbeat began. And it had a couple of
constant themes. One is that Iraq is an imminent threat to the security of the United
States: we have to stop them now, or they’re going to destroy us tomorrow. The
second is that Iraq was behind September 11. Nobody said this straight out, but it
was clearly insinuated. The third lie is that Iraq is going to arm terrorists who are
planning new atrocities, so, again, we’ve got to stop them now.
The polls reflected the propaganda very directly. Immediately after September 11,
2001, only 3 percent of the population thought that Iraq had been involved. Since
September 11, 2002, that number has grown to roughly 60 percent. More than half
the U.S. population believes that Iraq was responsible for September 11, that Iraqis
were on the planes, and that Iraq is planning new attacks. No one else in the world
believes any of this.

When Congress authorized the president to use force in October, it said that Iraq
was a threat to the security of the United States. Yet no other country regards Iraq
as a threat. Even Kuwait and Iran, both of which have been invaded by Iraq, don’t
regard Iraq as a threat to their security. As a result of the UN sanctions, which have
killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis — probably two-thirds of the population is
on the edge of starvation — Iraq has the weakest economy and the weakest
military force in the region. Its military expenditures are about one-third those of
Kuwait, which has one-tenth of Iraq’s population. And, of course, the real
superpower in the region is that offshore U.S. military base known as Israel, which
has hundreds of nuclear weapons and massive armed forces. After the U.S. takes
over, it’s very likely that Iraq will increase its military spending and maybe even
develop weapons of mass destruction just to counterbalance other states of the
region, particularly Iran. This administration will support the buildup, just as the
Reagan administration and the first Bush administration supported Saddam
Hussein’s military programs, including weapons of mass destruction, right up to
the day of his invasion of Kuwait.
But the other countries in the Middle East weren’t afraid of Iraq. They hated
Saddam Hussein, but they weren’t afraid of him. For the past five years, in fact,
they’ve been trying hard, over strong U.S. objections, to reintegrate Iraq back into
their own system. Only in the United States is there fear of Iraq. And you can trace
the growth of this fear to propaganda.

The United States controls the hemisphere. It controls both

oceans. . . . The last time the U.S. was threatened was during the
War of 1812. Since then, it has just conquered others. And
somehow this incredible security engenders a fear that somebody
is going to come after us.

Barsamian: It’s interesting that the United States is so susceptible to fear.

Chomsky: Whatever the reasons are for it, the United States happens to be a very
frightened country, comparatively speaking. Fears of almost everything — crime,
aliens, you name it — are off the chart.

And the people in Washington know this very well. They are, for the most part, the
same people who ran the country during the Reagan administration and the first
Bush administration. And they’re reusing the script: pursuing regressive domestic
programs and staying in power by pushing the panic button every year. If you do
this in the United States, it’s not hard to succeed.

Barsamian: What is it about our culture that makes Americans susceptible to

propaganda?

Chomsky: I didn’t say we’re more susceptible to propaganda; we’re more

susceptible to fear. We’re a frightened country. Frankly, I don’t understand the
reasons for this.

Barsamian: So if the fear is there, then propaganda becomes easier to implement.

Chomsky: Certain kinds of propaganda become much easier to implement. When

my kids were in school forty years ago, they were taught to hide under their desks
to protect themselves from atomic bombs. At that time, President Kennedy was
trying to organize the hemisphere to support his terrorist attacks against Cuba. The
U.S. is very influential in this hemisphere, and most countries just went along, but
Mexico refused. The Mexican ambassador said, “If I try to tell people in Mexico
that Cuba is a threat to our security, 40 million Mexicans will die laughing.”
People in the United States didn’t die laughing. They were — and are — afraid of
everything. Take crime. Our crime rate isn’t that much higher than any other
industrial society. Yet fear of crime is much greater here than in other countries.
Even nonsensical fears, like alien abduction, are higher. If you go to Europe and
ask people, “Are there aliens among us?” they’ll laugh. Here, probably half the
population will say yes.

Barsamian: Don’t you think the media contribute to that with TV crime shows
and movies?

Chomsky: Probably, but there is also a background fear that the media exploit,
and it goes pretty far back. It probably has to do with conquest of the continent,
where the colonists had to exterminate the native population; and with slavery,
where Americans had to control an oppressed people that threatened, if only by
their existence, to turn on their masters. And it may just be a result of the enormous
security we enjoy. The United States controls the hemisphere. It controls both
oceans. It cannot be seriously threatened. The last time the U.S. was threatened
was during the War of 1812. Since then, it has just conquered others. And
somehow this incredible security engenders a fear that somebody is going to come
after us.

Barsamian: On Thursday, March 6, President Bush gave a prime-time press

conference, his first in a year and a half. It was actually a scripted press
conference. He knew in advance whom he was going to call on. A study of the
transcript reveals Bush repeating certain words and phrases: “Iraq”; “Saddam
Hussein”; “increasing threat” or “deep threat”; “weapons of mass destruction”;
“9/11”; “terrorism.” On the following Monday, there was a sharp spike in public-
opinion polls: a majority of Americans now believed that Iraq was connected to
9/11.

Chomsky: You’re right about the spike in the polls, but the change began back in
September, when the poll results first indicated widespread belief in Iraqi
participation in 9/11. That belief has to be continually reinforced, however, or it
will drop off. These claims are so outlandish that it’s hard to make people believe
them unless you keep driving your point home.

You’re right, too, that these press conferences are carefully programmed events,
like television ads. The public-relations industry has plenty of experience in this.
President Reagan was carefully programmed. Everyone knew that if he got off his
notecards, he was going to say something insane. He was a media creation.

This administration has a collection of highly crafted media figures. George W.

Bush is crafted to be a simple, honest, religious, straight-talking man who’s got gut
instincts and a deep sense of morality. Colin Powell is made out to be the moderate
multilateralist, committed to diplomacy, so that when he stands up and says, “We
have to go to war,” people will think it must be true. There is not a particle of
evidence for Powell’s vaunted reputation, by the way. His record is horrendous.

But fear is the primary propaganda tool. Take a look at the 1988 presidential
campaign. How did George H.W. Bush get elected? The Willie Horton ad
campaign. Willie Horton was a convicted murderer serving time in a
Massachusetts state prison when Democratic presidential candidate Michael
Dukakis was governor. While out on a furlough, Horton, an African American,
raped a white woman. The message of the Bush campaign ads was clear: If
Dukakis is elected, an African American criminal is going to come and rape your
daughter. They didn’t say it in those words, but it was insinuated. And it shifted
public attitudes about Dukakis.

Actually, one of the most spectacular cases of propaganda occurred in September

1989. Throughout the 1980s, the drug war had been in the news, but in September
1989, the first President Bush intensified his Hispanic-narco-traffickers-are-going-
to-destroy-us rhetoric. Before that, drug trafficking hadn’t ranked high among
people’s concerns. By the end of the month, it was the public’s top concern. Media
coverage of the drug threat was greater than the coverage of all international affairs
put together. That campaign was a buildup to the invasion of Panama, which
occurred in December of that year.

Barsamian: How long has this sort of propaganda been in use?

Chomsky: The practice of using language and information to shape attitudes and
opinions and promote conformity and subordination is as old as history, but it
didn’t become an organized industry until the last century. And, contrary to what
one might expect, this industry was created in the more democratic societies.
The first coordinated propaganda ministry, called the Ministry of Information,
began in Britain during the First World War. It had the task, as the British
government put it, of “controlling the mind of the world.” And it was particularly
concerned with the minds of Americans. The British thought if they could
convince American intellectuals of the nobility of the war effort, then those
intellectuals could stir the remaining population of the United States — which
didn’t want to have anything to do with European wars, and rightly so — into a fit
of anti-German fanaticism and hysteria. This would convince the U.S. to join the
war, which was the ultimate goal, because Britain needed U.S. backing.

So Britain’s Ministry of Information aimed its efforts primarily at American

opinion leaders. And it succeeded, especially with liberals of the John Dewey
circle, who organized a propaganda campaign that, within a few months, turned a
relatively pacifistic population into fanatics who wanted to destroy everything
German. It got so the Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn’t play Bach. These
liberal intellectuals actually took pride in the fact that, for the first time, wartime
fanaticism was created not by military leaders and politicians, but by the more
responsible, serious members of the community — namely, them.

President Woodrow Wilson — who had won the election on the slogan “Peace
without victory” — reacted by setting up the first U.S. state-propaganda agency,
called the Committee on Public Information. The members of Wilson’s
propaganda agency included Edward Bernays, who later became the guru of the
public-relations industry, and Walter Lippmann, a respected media figure and
leading public intellectual of the day. And these men learned from that wartime
experience that they could control the public mind by controlling attitudes and
opinions. As Lippmann put it, we can “manufacture consent” by the means of
propaganda. Bernays said, “The more intelligent members of the community” can
drive the population to do whatever they want by way of what he called
“engineering of consent.” Both of them believed this to be the essence of
democracy.

The public-relations industry had existed before World War I , but it was very
small. It’s interesting to look back at the thinking in the 1920s, when public
relations really got started. This was the period of Taylorism in business; workers
were being trained to act like robots: “Move to the left here,” and so on. By turning
human beings into automatons, Taylorism created highly efficient industry. The
Bolsheviks were very impressed with this and tried to duplicate it throughout the
Soviet Union.
The thought-control experts soon realized that you could have not only “on-job
control” but also “off-job control.” Off-job control means turning people into
robots in every aspect of their lives by inducing a philosophy of futility and
focusing their attention on the superficial aspects of life, such as fashionable
consumption. Basically, it got the masses out of the way so that those who were
supposed to run the show could do it without any interference. And from that came
enormous industries, from advertising to universities, all consciously committed to
the concept that the elite must control attitudes and opinions, and the people have
no business in the public arena.

Barsamian: Which flies in the face of democratic principles.

Chomsky: Actually, they had good constitutional support for that position. This
country was founded on the Madisonian principle that the people are just too
dangerous to wield power: power has to be in the hands of what Madison called
“the wealth of the nation” — those who respect property and its rights and want to
protect the rich minority from the working majority. In order to do this, the
majority has to be fragmented somehow.
Barsamian: Why did public-relations propaganda flourish in democratic
societies?
Chomsky: Because governments there couldn’t rely on force to control the
population. If you can’t control people by force, it becomes necessary to control
attitudes and opinions. The public-relations industry was later imitated — with
varying degrees of success — in Germany and Bolshevik Russia and South Africa
and elsewhere. But these attempts were always based quite explicitly on the
American model.
In 1933 a progressive Wilsonian named Harold Lasswell — one of the founders of
modern political science — wrote an article called “Propaganda.” (People used the
term freely then, before it picked up negative connotations from the Nazis.) In his
article, which was published in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Lasswell said
we should not succumb to “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best
judges of their own interests.” And since people are too ignorant to understand
their best interests, his reasoning goes, great humanitarians like Lasswell must
marginalize and control them. And the best means for doing this is propaganda.
Propaganda, Lasswell said, is just a tool, as neutral as a pump handle. You can use
it for good or for evil. And since he and his associates were noble, wonderful
people, they’d use it for good — to ensure that the ignorant masses remained
marginalized and separated from any decision-making. This is not the right wing
that I’m talking about; these are the liberal, “progressive” intellectuals.
The Leninist doctrines are approximately the same: the “right” people would be in
control, because they know what’s best for everyone. The Nazis also picked up this
philosophy. If you read Mein Kampf, Hitler was very impressed with Anglo-
American propaganda. “The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to
a big lie than to a small one,” he wrote. And, “By shrewd and constant application
of propaganda, heaven can be presented to the people as hell,” and vice versa. He
argued, and not without reason, that propaganda was what had won the First World
War, and he vowed that the next time around the Germans would be ready. They
developed their own propaganda systems modeled on the democracies’. The
Russians tried it, too, but theirs was too crude to be effective. Always at the
forefront was the United States, because of course the more free and democratic
the society, the more important it is to control attitudes and opinions.
State-run propaganda continued in the U.S. right up to the 1980s. The Reagan
administration had what it called an Office of Public Diplomacy. But by that time,
the public was no longer willing to accept state-run propaganda agencies, so the
Office of Public Diplomacy was declared illegal, and the propagandists had to
operate in roundabout ways. What took its place were private corporate systems,
which don’t take orders from the government but are closely linked to it, of course.
And that’s our contemporary system. We don’t even have to speculate much about
what these companies are doing, because they’re kind enough to tell us in industry
publications and the academic literature.
Barsamian: One of the new lexical constructions of the Iraq war is “embedded
journalists.”
Chomsky: It is interesting that journalists are willing to accept that title. No
journalist would be willing to describe him- or herself as a government
propagandist, but to say, “I’m an embedded journalist,” is accepted. It helps
enforce the concept that anything America does is right and just; if you’re
embedded in an American unit, you’re objective.
The reverse notion showed up dramatically in the Peter Arnett case. Peter Arnett is
an experienced, respected journalist with a host of achievements to his credit, but
he’s condemned because he gave an interview on Iraqi television. Is anybody
condemned for giving an interview on U.S. television?

To somebody looking at this from the outside — say, some Martian — for an
independent journalist to give an interview to U.S. television is the same as to give
an interview to Iraqi television. In fact, being interviewed on U.S. television is less
neutral, because the U.S. is the aggressor. We’re invading Iraq. It’s as open an act
of aggression as there has been in modern history. There’s not even any attempt to
conceal it. It’s the same war crime for which the Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg:
the act of aggression. There’s a pretense of self-defense — there’s always a
pretense — but it’s no more convincing than Hitler’s.

But let’s put that aside for a moment. For an independent journalist, giving an
interview to the invader shouldn’t be any different than giving an interview to the
invaded. Yet the latter is described as treachery, abandoning journalistic integrity,
and so on. What that says about independent journalism in the U.S. is astounding.

There’s an article in the London Review of Books this week by Charles Glass, one
of the best American journalists in the Middle East — and therefore one of the
least-heard-from. He’s currently an ABC correspondent in Iraq, but they almost
never use him. In his article, he points out that the United States must be the only
country in the world that would call someone a terrorist for defending his or her
own country from attack.
Glass is sitting there in Iraq, watching this with wonder. In fact, anybody who is
even a little displaced from the United States and its system of indoctrination has
to observe this situation with wonder, if not enormous fear and hatred of the
United States.

We’re invading Iraq. It’s as open an act of aggression as there has

been in modern history. . . . It’s the same war crime for which the
Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg: the act of aggression. There’s a
pretense of self-defense . . . but it’s no more convincing than
Hitler’s.
Barsamian: The U.S. attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 generated some
interesting terms. One was “unlawful combatant.”
Chomsky: Prior to World War II , there were few laws of war, but this changed
under the Geneva Convention, which was established in the postwar period to
outlaw the crimes of the Nazis. Prisoners of war were granted special status by the
convention, among other things. The Bush administration, with the cooperation of
the media and the courts, is going back to the pre–World War II period, when there
was no international law dealing with war crimes. The Bush administration is not
only carrying out an aggressive war; it’s classifying the people it bombs or
captures as some new category of combatant that isn’t entitled to the rights granted
by the Geneva Convention.
In fact, the administration has gone well beyond that. It has now claimed the right
to arrest American citizens and place them in confinement indefinitely without
access to families or lawyers, and with no charges made against them. Presumably,
these “suspects” will remain imprisoned until the president decides that the war on
terror, or whatever he wants to call it, is over. What’s going on is a gross violation
of the most elementary principles of international humanitarian law. It’s unheard of
in an industrialized nation, and yet it’s been, to some extent, accepted by the
courts.

In fact, a new act, sometimes called PATRIOT Act 2, is being kicked around inside
the Justice Department. So far it’s not been ratified, but there have been a couple of
articles about it in the press by law professors and others. It’s astonishing. The
government is claiming the right to remove citizenship, the most fundamental
right, if the attorney general “infers” — they don’t even have to have evidence —
that a person is somehow involved in actions that might be harmful to the United
States. You have to go to totalitarian states to find anything like this.
Look at Winston Churchill. Right in the middle of the Second World War he
condemned the use of executive power to imprison people without charge as the
most odious of crimes. And Britain was in rather desperate straits at the time, not
like the United States today. There is a bust of Churchill looking at George Bush
every day in the White House, but the president might pay better attention to
Churchill’s words.

Barsamian: What do you make of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s saying
on Nightline that the attack on Iraq “is not an invasion”?
Chomsky: Tony Blair is a good propaganda agent for the United States: he’s
articulate, his sentences flow together, and people apparently like the way he looks.
He’s following a position that Britain has self-consciously taken since the end of
the Second World War. During that war, Britain realized that it was not going to be
the dominant world power any longer. The U.S. was. And Britain had to make a
choice: would it be just another country, or would it be a junior partner of the
United States? It accepted the role of junior partner, and that’s what it’s been ever
since. It brings to the table centuries of experience brutalizing and murdering
foreign peoples.

Barsamian: The British occupied Iraq in the early 1920s.

Chomsky: When Britain ran the region, it did just what the U.S. is doing now:
it undermined international conventions banning the use of air power against
civilians. British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s comment was blunt: he said
we have to “reserve the right to bomb niggers.” It’s the same now, because
moral principles like that are lasting; they don’t change.
Barsamian: At the talks you give, you’re often asked, “What should I do?” We
heard this question just last night in Denver, for example.
Chomsky: You hear it a lot from American audiences, but you never hear it in
the Third World. When I go to Turkey or Colombia or Brazil, they don’t ask
me, “What should I do?” They tell me what they’re doing. When I went to
Porto Alegre, Brazil, the first thing I did was go to a Via Campesina
(International Peasant Union) meeting at a Landless Workers Movement farm.
These are poor, oppressed people living under horrendous conditions, yet
they would never dream of asking me what to do. They know what to do, and
they do it. It’s only highly privileged people who ask, “What should I do?”
We have every option open to us. We can do anything. But we’re trained to
look for a quick and easy solution that will let us go back to our ordinary lives,
and it doesn’t work that way. If you want to do something, you’re going to
have to be dedicated and committed. You have to keep at it, day after day. We
all know what needs to be done: it’s educational programs; it’s organizing; it’s
activism. That’s the way things change. You want a magic fix that will enable
you to go back to watching television tomorrow? It’s not there.

Barsamian: You were an active and early opponent to U.S. intervention in

Indochina in the 1960s. How has dissent changed since then in the United
States?
Chomsky: Actually, another article in the New York Times today offers an
interesting perspective on that. The article says that professors are the
antiwar activists today, whereas the students used to be the primary antiwar
activists. That’s a common misconception about the sixties. It’s true that, by
1970, as the article states, students were active antiwar protesters. But that
was after eight years of a U.S. war in South Vietnam. In the early years of the
war, from 1962 on, U.S. planes were bombing South Vietnam, the use of
napalm was authorized, chemical weapons were used to destroy food crops,
and U.S.–sponsored programs drove millions of people into “strategic
hamlets” — essentially concentration camps. All of this was public. Yet there
was little or no protest. It was impossible to get anybody to talk about it. Even
in a liberal city like Boston, you couldn’t hold a public meeting against the war
because it would be broken up — by students. You needed hundreds of state
police around to allow the speakers — most of them professors like me — to
escape unscathed. The student antiwar protests came after years and years of
war. By then, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed, much of
Vietnam had been destroyed, and the war had spread to all of Indochina.
I’m sure the Times reporter is only saying what she was taught: that there was
a huge, spontaneous, student-led antiwar movement. All of the early history of
protest has been wiped out, because it tells the truth: that years and years of
hard work by many people finally ended up building a protest movement. But
the New York Times can’t report that, because you can’t learn that dedicated,
committed effort can bring about significant changes. That’s a very dangerous
thought to allow people to have. What we hear about is the tail end of the
movement, after all the real work was done. And we say, “How come it’s not
like that now, with this war?”
Barsamian: How does one distinguish propaganda from news, and what are
some techniques of resisting it?
Chomsky: There are no techniques, just ordinary common sense. If you hear
that Iraq is a threat to our existence, but its closest neighbor Kuwait doesn’t
regard it as a threat, nor does anybody else in the world, you should ask, “OK,
where is the evidence?” As soon as you ask this, the story collapses.
You have to be critical of whatever is presented to you in any media. Of
course, the whole media system and the educational system are designed to
drive critical thoughts from your mind. You’re taught to be a passive, obedient
follower. And unless you can break out of those habits, you’ll be a victim of
propaganda. But it’s not that hard to break out.

In 1985, President Reagan declared a national emergency because of the

threat posed to the U.S. by the government of Nicaragua, which, he pointed
out, was two days’ drive from Harlingen, Texas. If you listened to Reagan,
Nicaragua was poised to take over the hemisphere. That National Emergency
Declaration of 1985, which was a means of building support for the U.S.’s
covert war in Nicaragua, was a model for the Congressional declaration of
2002. The wording is almost the same. Just replace “Nicaragua” with “Iraq.”

How much critical thinking does it take to determine that Nicaragua is no

threat to the United States? Again, people outside the U.S. just look at this in
wonder. Throughout the 1980s, the tourist industry in Europe collapsed every
few years because Americans would read news stories that made them afraid
to go to Europe. They thought there would be some Arab there who would try
to kill them. Europeans don’t know what to make of this. How can a country
be so frightened of something that is completely nonexistent?

Barsamian: That’s happening again right now.

Chomsky: Yes, but to break out of this, we simply need to use our ordinary
intelligence. Just examine what’s presented to you with common sense and
skepticism. Read the newspaper the same way you would read Iraqi
propaganda. How do you decide that the minister of information in Iraq isn’t
to be trusted? Look at your own government the same way.