Ashville Global Report: Speaking of the domestic front, many people have become concerned about threats to civil rights in the US as we engage in what seems to be an endless "War on Terror." The USA PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress in the name of "homeland defense," expanded the government's freedom to tap phones, detain suspects, monitor internet communications, and conduct secret searches, while at the same time reducing judicial oversight of such actions. Additionally, President Bush has passed an executive order to keep all presidential records since 1980 locked away, and Attorney Gen. Ashcroft has urged various federal agencies to actively resist Freedom of Information Act requests.
You've remarked a number of times that Americans have greater access to internal government records than perhaps anyone else in the world, a resource that is obviously very important in the work you do. What are your concerns regarding these issues of civil rights?
Noam Chomsky: There are concerns. I'm less concerned about them than a lot of other people are, because I think there's too much resistance to it domestically. But one is certainly right to be concerned. One instantaneous reaction to Sept. 11, predictable and instantaneous, is that every harsh, repressive force in the world, virtually, regarded it as a window of opportunity to pursue their own agenda. So in, say, Russia, it meant stepping up their atrocities in Chechnya. In Turkey, it meant increasing repression against freedom of speech, particularly against the Kurdish population, and in Israel it meant sending tanks into refugee camps.
In the United States, Britain, India, and other such democracies, it means increasing efforts to control the domestic population. The elite groups in the political system, the economic system, and the ideological system despise democracy, for perfectly good reasons: they want to control things. They don't want the people to be involved. So, if they can find ways to marginalize the public and to protect state power from public scrutiny, they'll naturally use those methods, and the Bush administration is using them.
There's not unanimity within elite circles. This group that happens to be in power now is toward the more authoritarian, and, if you like, quasi-fascist, side of the spectrum. It's not new. The Reagan administration, for example...
[U]nder the laws you are supposed to release documents after a 30-year period. After that, the government is supposed to release declassified documents, not all of them, and with some internal censorship, but most of them are supposed to be released. And there's the committee of historians, pretty conservative historians, from the academic world, who supervise this process for the State Dept. That's the way it's supposed to work.
The Reagan administration was supposed to be releasing documents from the early 1950's that included the US coup in Iran and the military coup in Guatemala. Those are the major, crucial ones. They didn't release them. They apparently destroyed them. This was so blatant an act of quasi-fascism, that the historians' board resigned in public protest. That had never happened before. And these are very conservative guys.
Well, that was extreme, but the Bush administration is the same people and they would like to do the same thing. They do not want the public to have any idea what the state is doing. They claim to be free-market people, and all that kind of stuff, but that's nonsense. Like the Reaganites, they believe in an extremely powerful state which serves the interests of the rich and which is immune to inspection by the public. That's their faith. They want to have that. I don't want to suggest that it's just them. That's the general consensus, but they're at the extreme end.
So, yes, they're using this opportunity to try to protect state power from public scrutiny. That's part of trying to make the public more obedient and submissive. The so-called PATRIOT ACT, (anybody who looks at the name knows exactly what to expect) yeah, that's aimed at the same direction. They would like more control over people, more surveillance, more obedience, more fear, general marginalization. That's the way you can get away with that. You can ram through policies you know the public is opposed to. |
