good evening and welcome to Burlington City Hall a scene of many exciting Adventures uh during the last couple of years uh we have had a number of prominent and important spokespeople uh come to Burlington Vermont and tonight we're very proud to welcome n trony from MIT who has been a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America uh at a time when many intellectuals and active magicians find it more comfortable to be silent and to go with the flow as it were it is confident to find on occasion individuals who have the guts to speak out uh about the import uh issues of our time and certainly Professor chsky has been a person to do it I am particularly delighted to welcome here to city hall because one of the things that we are trying to do in Burlington is to do away with this gap between what happens up there on the hill and what happens down here or what presumably happens in Washington regarding Nicaragua and what happens here in local government we have the belief here that local government is everything that affects human life and last night I was very proud that the board of Oldman by an 8 to3 vote approved the resolution supporting opposition to president rego's in Reagan's imgo to nicaragu and our point of view was that what happens in Nicaragua what happens in Washington what is done in the name of the United States of America was done in all of our names and it is absolutely a local issue so without saying more uh without going any longer I am delighted to welcome uh a person uh who I think we're very all very proud of Professor n tronsky [Applause] [Applause] the United States is quite unusual among industrial democracies in a number of respects uh one of them one of the most obvious uh simply has to do with the uh ordinary political participation so for example as as measured say in voting in uh presidential elections the United States is remarkably low among comparable Societies in the level of political participation and a more interesting feature of that is the following if you look at the non-voters in the United States they're socioeconomically identifiable pretty well uh they are essentially the kind of people who in some European society would vote for one of the labor-based parties uh either labor or socialist or communist all of which are essentially kind of reformist labor-based parties that have a labor constituency and work for them in one fashion or another by and large those people don't vote here uh among the unemployed for example in the last election only a third voted uh and if you uh look at the statistics you find this quite General and it's been going on for a long time uh well evidently those people regard themselves as disenfranchised they don't see any point in voting for what amounts to one of the two uh branches of the Tory party uh there being none that uh is that has them as its constituency there are other respects in which one finds this kind of particularity of the United States so for example just a couple of days ago there was an article in the Boston Globe my hometown where uh they referred to Howard Zin an old friend of mine there was an article about him and the way he was censored at the bu uh and it referred to him there as an avowed socialist kind of with a gasp you know as sort of like an avowed murderer or something he actually says it and so on well again in Europe that would just be comical you know you couldn't refer to anybody as an avowed socialist as if that were something surprising or in the media in the United States uh as far as I know there isn't a single columnist or reporter for that matter uh who either would identify himself as sort of a main mainstream socialist or if he would would be willing to allow it to be known and again in Europe that's just inconceivable it's unimaginable uh the all all of this reflects a kind of an ideological uniformity and rigidity in the United States which is striking and is a kind of a counterpart to the uh to the lack of to the absence in the political system of any uh of any uh organization that represents uh the interests of poor or disadvantaged or working people uh one of the best young scholars of American political history mat Tom Ferguson has pointed out in a recent very important study of American political history that political parties in the United States are I'm quoting now blocks of major investors who coales to advanc candidates uh representing their interests the real market for political parties is not voters but rather major investors who generally have good and clear reasons for investing to control the state and correspondingly uh in federal elections people either lots of people who interests are not those of those coal groups of investors either don't vote or also if you look at they also tend to vote contrary to their interests contrary to their political commitments as U uh many detailed Studies have shown so for for example in the last election of Reagan voters uh who were a small minority of the electorate about 2/3 uh said that they hoped that his policies weren't enacted uh what that uh that uh mean that reflects a kind of rational understanding of the political system uh it reflects the understanding that uh the choices are sort of uh between pepsicola and Coca-Cola you're effectively disenfranchised anyway so you might as well vote for the guy who makes feel good the policies are not going to change all that much maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration but it reflects a certain perception and understanding of of political reality well these are some of many indications of uh what is in fact a rather striking uh striking property striking fact about the United States namely again differentiating it from other similar Societies in the United States there's an extraordinarily High degree of class Consciousness on the part of the privileged classes on the part of business uh professionals uh the uh Elite in intellectuals who associate themselves with privilege and Power in those groups there's a very high unusually high degree of class Consciousness which manifests itself in lots of ways and correspondingly there's an unusually low degree of class Consciousness on the part of of working people uh a good deal about the United States reflects that that phenomenon which does Mark this country out uh to a considerable extent as distinct from from other similar societies well one particular manifestation of this uh of this phenomenon is is the public relations industry which again is a peculiarly American phenomenon it exists elsewhere but nowhere on the scale that it does here uh this goes way back in the United States in the early part of the 20th century it was beginning to become significant in 1909 an AT&T executive uh commented that the public mind is the only serous danger confronting the company and uh the pr this the the pr industry public relations industry was in fact created in order to control this threat to control the public mind and prevent it from being a threat to major corporations during the first World War the government got into the ACT uh the the the government uh created the first major official propaganda agency called the Creo commission its purpose was to try to to uh drive a General generally pacifistic population uh into into the European War uh the head of the cre commission referred to this as the World's Greatest Adventure in advertising uh and the uh a lesson was learned the lesson that was Learned was that uh The Government Can in fact control the framework of discussion by flooding the media with so-called facts amounting to official information and also by defining the issues uh that are allowed to be discussed so by those means and and once that if that can be done effectively it really doesn't matter what the outcome of debate is uh if you can Define the issues uh As You Wish you've essentially won the battle and that lesson was learned during the war one of the one of the major members of the Creo commission was a man named Edward Beres who uh learned the lesson well he became the essentially the patron saint of the modern public relations industry its leading figure years later uh he wrote about what he called the engineering of consent which he described as the essence of democracy the power to persuade now he didn't go into the question of who has the power to persuade the answer is pretty obvious it's the people who own and manage the society but it's a conception of democracy which is very significant in the United States the essence of democracy is the power to persuade which is in the hands of those who essentially own and manage the private economy and that defines what democracy is uh long before that in fact shortly after the first world war Walder Lipman uh the major American journalist had recognized the same point uh partly because of the experiences of the first world war he uh discussed in 1921 what he called the manufacturer of consent which he said is an art uh that will cause a revolution in the practice of democracy uh this idea was taken up with great enthusiasm in the social sciences uh one of the leading American political scientists Harold lasswell that's very influential wrote an article in the encyclopedia of social science in 1933 on propaganda in which he sort of gave all of this a theoretical basis uh he made a distinction between Democratic societies and what we nowadays we didn't use the term then would call totalitarian States and he pointed out that uh propaganda has a very different function in those two kinds of societies in a totalitarian state or a military society and so on propaganda isn't all that important because the state can control Behavior by force but in a Democratic Society where the state is restricted in its ability to use Force against citizens at least relatively privileged citizens who have means to defend themselves uh in such a society propaganda becomes much more important he pointed out and the reason is that the voice of the people is heard and therefore it's necessary to ensure that that voice says the right things uh that that voice says the things that the leadership regards as correct in a totalitarian society that doesn't matter so much uh because they're going to do what they want anyway and if you don't like it you'll suffer but in a in a the more democratic a society is the more indoctrination is needed the more you need manufacturer of consent and uh lasswell went on to say that we should not succumb to what he called Democratic dogmatisms such as the idea that people are the best judges of their own interests that's not true uh despite Mass education and so on people have no idea what their best interests are the only people who understand their best interests are the privileged Elites and since we have this unfortunate phenomenon of democracy uh we have to make sure that privileged Elites are not uh restricted in their ability to carry through the policies that are in fact in the interest of everyone uh which means you have to have an effective system of indoctrination you have to have real manufacturer of consent uh he went on to he said that we should regard we shouldn't regard propaganda negatively he said propaganda is completely neutral he said it's as neutral as a pump handle you can use it for good or for evil and since of course we're good we're going to use propaganda for good purposes and therefore we should have a positive attitude uh towards it it's again the essence of democracy well uh this is a all of this is familiar in another context this is all a typical leninist ideal uh the leninist concept is that the Vanguard party which uh represents and understands the interests of uh of the work class uh should lead because the workers are just too stupid to understand what their own interests are so therefore the Vanguard party which will take control uh on the basis of their revolutionary activity will lead them uh because it understands you know what's right and so on and so forth and in fact the relationship between leninist Concepts and the uh the liberal intelligency in the west is extremely close there's the very similar managerial concept of uh control and indoctrination and I think this goes part of the way towards explaining why it's what a certain phenomenon which has been very common over the years namely the very sudden and Rapid shift from party loyalist to West American jingoist this happens over and over again and I think the reason it's so easy is it doesn't really require much of a change in political conception it re really requires a change in estimate as to where the future is really a kind of a change in in choice of Masters uh more than a change of ideas uh well what I want to talk about tonight is how all of this there's a lot to say about this but I wanted drop at the general talk there and talk about how this works out in practice and I want to let me take two current examples and if there's time go into some others because there are many uh one example I want to discuss is the recent uh uh Spate of Vietnam retrospectives uh that have appeared in all the media in the last couple of couple of weeks uh commemorating or I guess uh uh what the right word is maybe commiserating over the the last the 10th anniversary of of the departure of American troops from Vietnam and the second case I want to discuss is current situation in Central America which in many ways is strikingly similar remarkably similar to what was going on in Vietnam in the early 1960s and that has lessons there one of the consequences of the disparity in class Consciousness that is the high level of class Consciousness among privileged Elites and the very low level of class Consciousness among everyone else one of the consequences of that is that privileged Elites are able to learn from history and improve their performance whereas the rest of the rest of us don't uh because we don't learn from history and we don't have the resources to even discover what it was and in fact it's essentially eliminated down the memory Hole uh given the control over resources and I think it's important to try to overcome that so I will try to draw some parallels between these two situations as I'm sure they're being drawn in in Washington too well let's begin with the Vietnam retrospectives uh but let me begin first by stepping back a bit and trying out a uh kind of a thought experiment you know imaginary situation uh let's imagine that the Soviet Union after many years of fighting uh leaves Afghanistan as incidentally they say they will do if what they call neutrality is guaranteed there so suppose in fact they leave Afghanistan and suppose 10 years after that uh they have retrospective accounts in the party press what would we expect to find there and what would we expect to be omitted well I think that's pretty easy what we'd expect to find is a focus on the terrorism and violence of the uh of the uh Rebels and there'd be plenty to say about that and we'd also expect to find a focus on the misery and suffering and repression uh in the period after the Soviet Union withdrew and there'd be plenty of that too when you destroy a society there's going to be plenty of suffering and mostly the brutal most brutal elements Will Survive and take over uh so there'd be lots of talk about that and lots of wailing and shedding tears and so on uh there would uh also be talk about the noble cause of the uh Soviet Union which came to the defense of the legitimate government of Afghanistan against uh terrorist Bandits organized by the CIA and so on and so forth uh some things would also be omitted uh one thing that would be sure to be omitted from these retrospective accounts would be the actual war that is what actually happened you know what were the military operations what did they do to people and so on and another thing that would be omitted certainly would be the planning that lay behind the war you know with the reasons for it the things that led the Soviet Union into it well that's the end of the thought experiment now let's turn to the real world uh and we can be rather brief because what I've just described is exactly what we've seen in the last month the the American Media behaved exactly in the way we would expect the well- disciplined uh party press to behave in the Soviet Union or any other totalitarian state uh a number of things were in fact exactly the ones I described and a number of things were focused on exactly the ones I described let's look a little more carefully one thing that was omitted virtually totally in the media was the war against South Vietnam American in fact there it isn't even known in the United States that there was an American war against South Vietnam the only thing that exists in American history is the American defense of South Vietnam that's our way of referring to the fact that we attacked and practically destroyed South Vietnam I'll come back to that later uh but the actual not only uh was was it is the concept missing but there was no description of it so if you read time Newsweek New York Times Wall Street Journal you know down the list uh you'll find strikingly missing the actual war no description of the ground operations of the bombing and so on and so forth the only exception that I saw in a review of all the media on this was uh two pages in Newsweek by Ron Moro and Tony Clifton which in fact referred to the fact that there was a war there and described some of its consequences so that was missing another thing that was missing was any discussion of the background planning for the war the reasons why the United States got into it there's a ton of documentation on this this is a very open society and we have plenty of access to high level planning documents and there's a it's it's very well understood in fact if you want to bother understanding what led the United States into the war but that was missing down the memory hole not a mention of it not I I didn't even see a word of that what you found instead was something different what you read was uh that uh the war was uh a mistake but a noble mistake that it was uh ucer it was a failed Crusade undertaken with the loftiest intentions these incidentally are the phrases used by Stanley Carno in the uh best selling companion volume to the PBS television series which is uh uh highly praised or criticized for its critical cander and which in fact is now the subject of a right-wing attack which will soon be aired because it was only obedient to this party line and not sufficiently servile to it so there we read that we started with the loftiest intentions and failed Crusade no evidence is given to testify that no evidence is offered to suggest that we had lofty intentions or anything else that's just party line I mean you don't need evidence for that or you read that we entered because of I'm quoting now blundering efforts to do good although this became a disaster by 1969 that's Anthony Lewis who is I think the harshest CR critic of the war in the American press or you read that uh we entered in an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence uh uh and that our defense of South Vietnam was badly conceived that's John King Fairbank uh who's the leading American Asia scholar and about the harshest critic of the war in American foreign policy you could find in in anything close to mainstream academic circles and on and on like that uh you'll notice that everybody's been quoting as a these are all the critics of American policy the spectrum of opinion extends from them you know from the idea that we entered in an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence over to Norman portz and Ronald Reagan that's the Spectrum if you got a magnifying glass you can actually see that there's something in between and that's that's important it's very important to notice that this is what the critics say and it's also important to notice that none of this has to be justified that is nobody who puts forth these views gives any evidence for it or feels that any evidence is required that reflects an extremely extraordinarily High degree of success in manufacturer of consent and indoctrination you don't even recognize that there's an alternative a conceivable alternative to the party line it's not just that you adopt the party line it's inconceivable that there could be any alternative to it so therefore you don't have to give an argument well that's the critics uh and all of this illustrates rather well these uh conceptions of the differences between democracy and totalitarianism that I mentioned before uh in it's necessary in a democracy to have a level of control over thought so in so extensive that it is impossible even to imagine that there could be an alternative to the party line that thought has to be entirely constrained within the spectrum of the critics who I just mentioned and and the right and that's very different from a totalitarian state in a totalitarian state typically you have a kind of a Ministry of Truth which produces the truth and everybody identify it you know where it's coming from it's coming from the government uh and you you have to obey uh the extent to which there there's often a cost for Disobedience how costly it is depends on the violence of the state so for example in the Soviet Union if you disobey uh you can be you might be ignored but if not you could be sent for psychiatric torture or uh prison or Exile under Grim conditions or something like that in a typical American dependency like El Salvador uh what'll happen is you'll end up in a ditch with your head cut off after hideous torture uh and States vary you know on the level of violence that they use that's us that's them uh uh but it's always dangerous in a democracy typically that doesn't happen uh you don't have a Ministry of Truth which presents the party line which you can then this totalitarian system in a certain sense leaves you free internally free you don't really have to believe it you can identify it you have to you can't there's there's a danger in departing from it openly but you can essentially believe whatever you want uh in a democratic system that's not true you can't believe whatever you want it's dangerous if you believe whatever you want uh because they can't do to you what they do to you in El Salvador uh therefore you better only think the right thoughts and therefore all thought has to be constrain so we get the result that I just described and that was typical throughout the U throughout the war there was uh it's kind of intriguing to see how it worked there was of course a debate over the war during in the 60s in mainstream circles that debate was between people called Hawks and people called doves uh the Hawks were people like for example journalist Joseph ala who held that if the United States used sufficient degree of violence it could win the war and the doves were people like Arthur Schlesinger was described as an anti-war leader and kind of a leading Dove and his view was that no matter even if we used extensive violence we probably wouldn't win although he went on to say I'm quoting now that we all pray that Mr alsa will be right and if the American government does succeed he said we will all be praising the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government uh in reducing Vietnam to what he called a land of Ruin and wreck now that's the dove position uh if you read and that's not very far in the past read today's editorials about El Salvador and that's exactly what the liberal press is saying they're saying well looks like we can reduce the land to ruin and wreck and Massacre enough people so that we'll win so therefore we should all be praising the wisdom and states ship with the government that's the critic's position as it's been in the past now between those two positions the doves and the Hawks you're allowed to have a debate in fact the better the more vigorous the debate the better the propaganda system likes it because the more vigorous the debate the more deeply you instill the unstated principles which are of course that the United States has the right to use force and violence to achieve its ends and the only uh the only question that can be raised about this is whether it will succeed at a sufficient uh at a low enough cost now again in a in a totalitarian system you could never put forth that principle uh it would be too crude uh but in a democratic system again you don't say it openly but it's presupposed by the debate and the idea is that uh that's supposed to and it often does instill the principle so the ordinary person on the outside uh will say well you know if even the critics assume this who am I to question it uh and uh in fact it's the critics who play the major role in a democratic system of thought control in in ensuring that the manufacturer of consent works that's incidentally why they're tolerated in fact honored they play a major role my own view is that if dictators were smarter they would use our system uh I think it they don't understand the benefits of a lively exciting debate uh between positions which assume the same principles and appear to be uh at opposite ends because they differ tactically with regard to how well those principles can be enacted that's a very effective technique of thought control one that's been honed to a high art in the United States as part of our general PR system well let me say that uh here we have to enter some qualifications while this propaganda system worked like a dream among the educated classes uh it didn't work all that well among the population at large and that shows up it shows up uh in polls for example uh so for as recently as 1982 which is the latest one I saw uh the gallop Poole uh asked the question at have poll you know they're the United States a heavily pulled country not for our information but because business likes to monitor public attitudes for all sorts of reasons sometimes we also hear about it uh and the they have polls on International Affairs uh and uh one in 1982 they asked the question do you think that the Vietnam War was a mistake or was it I'm quoting now fundamentally wrong and immoral well of the general population 72% said it was fundamentally wrong and immoral uh many fewer opin so-called opinion leaders held that position that includes clergy and so on and among articulate intellectuals virtually nobody ever held that position uh even at the height of opposition to the war the number of people who felt that it was something other than a mistake that aggression is wrong in other words was minuscule among the educated classes Uh there's Big split in other words between the attitude of the general population on this issue and the attitude of the educat classes uh that split even has a name it's called the Vietnam syndrome uh the term the terminology is interesting syndrome is a term you used for a disease right and the Vietnam syndrome is a kind of a disease that spread over the population namely uh the discipline began to break down not among the educated they are at held they held the line uh but among the general population discipline began to break down and this disease spread with really terrifying symptoms such as a refusal to follow orders or raising questions about what the state is doing or uh even worse something like say sympathy for victims of American violence and feelings of solidarity with them and so on that's a disease that has to be overcome it's not a disease that was ever widespread or even particularly noticeable among privileged or educated groups uh but it did spread among the population uh and this distinction incidentally is not unique to this case in many cases you find that the educated parts of the population are the most extensively indoctrinated the ones who understand least about the world uh and the ones who believe most fervently the principles of the faith and that's not surprising either if you think about it educated people are subjected to much more intensive indoctrination well that's what education is uh and you know they are the ones that who who suffer from it they're its victims but also they have a kind of class interest in believing it because their social role is to be the purveyors of of propaganda so therefore it's necessary to kind of internalize it and believe it and if you don't do that you sort of were marginalized and eliminated from the intellectual class so it's not too surprising that among the educated you find the least understanding uh and uh the most uh profound indoctrination the inability for example even to conceive that there could be an alternative to the party line on issues such as those I discussed well let me turn now to the uh things that are omitted in this discussion uh there are two major things that were omitted in the retrospectives the first is is the background planning and here let me generalize it uh because in fact there is underlying the American war in Vietnam that you wouldn't know it from the media from most books there was a very well-worked out geopolitical conception which didn't only apply to Vietnam but applies worldwide uh my own feeling is if you understand this geopolitical conception a lot of what happens in the world will fall into place now and in the future and if you don't understand it most of what's going on in the world is going to look like a total mystery uh and just kind of wandering around random from blunder to blunder or something like that uh but uh uh the and you can even get a pretty good uh reputation as a profit if you get to understand what the underlying thinking is uh and it's again well documented though you got to search to find the documents they're not you know they're suppressed in effect uh the uh the the main this this I mean it goes way back but I start from the second world war which represented a qualitative change the United States emerged from the second world war in a position of global power that had very few counterpart probably no counterpart in history uh I doubt if there' ever been a time in history when any single power uh had such a degree of world domination in terms of control over wealth in terms of military power and so on and uh going back to what I said before American Elites are very class conscious very self-conscious they understood this they plan uh and they prepared they uh worked out how the postwar world should be how it should be run and organized so as to conform to uh their interests in a world that they expected to rule and dominate to an extent without historical precedent from 1939 to 1945 there were a long series of meetings run by the Council on Foreign Relations which is the major business input into policy planning and the state department it included all top planners in the state department this is called the war piece studies group and they were essentially planning the post-war world uh by 1943 or so it was pretty obvious how it was going to come out uh and uh they developed a concept which they called the Grand area the grand area was to be a region subordinated to the needs of the American economy as one planner put it it was a region strategically necessary for World control and the grand area was to include as a minimum the entire Western Hemisphere uh the Far East and the former British Empire which we were in the process of taking over during the war that's incidentally something called anti-imperialism in American uh history writing uh and it was also to include Western Europe and the oil producing regions of the Middle East and in fact everything if possible but at least that much that was the Grand area which was to be supported subordinated to the needs of the American economy and rather detailed plans were laid for particular regions in the grand area I'll come back to some of them uh the thinking behind all of this was explained very lucidly by one of the most important American political thinkers and planners of the period namely George Kennan he's interesting for one thing because he's smart uh and he says things clearly and accurately he's also interesting for the same reason that the critics I quoted before are interesting he's at an at the end of the spectrum he's at the Humane liberal doish end of the spectrum and he's also very lucid so his conception soort of aforor everything hold it holds for everyone else worse in other words so here's what you hear at the liberal end of the Spectrum in this period this is George Kennan uh uh in February 1948 happens to be the top secret document that I'm quoting from uh paraphrasing I'm not actually quoting he says there that uh he he starts by pointing out that the United States has 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of the world's population this disparity he says causes envy and resentment uh the major goal of our foreign policy must be to maintain the disparity now to maintain the disparity it's going was going to require harsh me meur es we therefore should put aside what he called vague and idealistic slogans such as quoting now human rights raising of the living standards and democratization and be prepared to use harsh measures the less we're hamper hampered by idealistic slogans the better we should put aside all ideas about world benefaction and altruism and be ready to use Force if necessary that's the message uh that's the way you maintain the disparity well that was the planning from the liberal side uh let me make a comment on that first when he talks about the disparity between the United States and the rest of the world there's something hidden of course the United States doesn't mean the people of the United States uh there's actually a comparable disparity internal to the United States and that must be maintained too although we didn't bother to say that because this is foreign policy but internal to the United States there's also a disparity which has to be maintained and for that you also need harsh measures uh and in fact the planners recognized throughout that if the United States move towards a more egalitarian society something which is obviously not contemplated or conceivable uh then it would be not it would not be necessary to have a global order subordinated to the needs of the American economy there were other kinds of Arrangements that would be possible uh without such uh Primacy given to what we ought to call the freedom to Rob uh if uh if if you didn't have to maintain the internal disparity but of course that was not in question that's also discussed extensively well that was Canon as a gen that that document actually happened to refer to the Far East but the United States is a global power and the same ideas were developed for other regions continuing with Kenan uh in the case of Latin America the other area I want to talk about uh Kenan explained in a briefing to Latin American ambassadors that uh uh he explained that uh the a prime goal of our foreign policy must be what he called the protection of our raw materials notice no mincing of words here protection of our raw materials and protection of our raw materials means protection against the indigenous population because they're the only ones that are going to take them we' already kicked out the British and the Russians are only there to frighten the domestic population but the real enemy is the indigenous population uh and we got to protect their raw materials from them and to do so he said again harsh measures will be necessary we should not uh refrain from police measures if necessary he said it's better to have a harsh government in power than a government that's liberal and relaxed and tolerant of what you called Communists well here the term Communists has a very special meaning in American political theology it refers to people whatever their political commitments who are committed to taking stealing our resources that is to using them for uh domestic needs they're communist by definition uh and doesn't matter what they believe they believe New Deal capitalist or whatever uh but they're communist uh and those are the people against whom we have to use harsh measures including police measures which makes some sense if we have to protect their resources and maintain the disparity as the prime element in our foreign policy uh well uh that's Latin America uh incidentally the what kenon may very well have had in mind was a state department intelligence report that had come out just a year earlier which warned of a rather dangerous doctrine that was spreading over much of the world including Latin America namely the belief that I'm quoting now that governments have a responsibility for the welfare of their people now that's communism in our terms and obviously that has to be stopped because if governments arise that have a responsibility for the welfare of their people they don't have a corresponding responsibility for our welfare and that's obviously the Transcendent need if you have to protect our raw materials and uh uh maintain the disparity well that's Latin America with regard to Asia the geopolitical picture that was developed was that sooner or later Japan was going to be reconstituted as the industrial Heartland of Asia uh Japan is a resource poor area and also needs markets therefore the in order to ensure that the United that Japan this industrial society remains essentially within American control it would be necessary to provide Japan with uh resources and raw materials which meant primarily South and Southeast Asia so in This Global remember these are Global planners they're not playing for small stakes in the global planning that was developed the United States was going to have to ensure that a reindustrialize Japan operating within the framework of American power would have access to resources and raw materials in particular in Southeast Asia that's in fact directly the thinking that led us behind uh into the Vietnam War now let me turn to what was that that's the omitted geopolitical conception that's never discussed none of this is ever discussed in the planning docu in the retrospectives OR in fact almost anywhere in American history except unless you go to sort of technical monographs that you are sure that only a small number of people are going to read or something uh and let me say that I've just barely touch the surface this goes on to quite detailed and explicit planning pursuing these basic ideas and about the way it expect well now let's turn to the omitted history the history that was down the memory hole in these retrospectives remember what happened let's remind ourselves of that starting around 1948 the United States recognized explicitly all of this all of this in secret documents in public of course you don't talk about things like this like no president gets up to the public and says uh look folks we have to rob the rest of the world in order to maintain the disparity between us and Them meaning between the rich here and them uh meanwhile keeping you guys down where you belong to uh and we're going to have to use Force to do that presidents don't say that what they talk about is our Noble objectives and our lofty intentions and so on and the well-disciplined intellectuals repeat that stuff for them that's what the media are about and what the schools and universities are about and so on but this is now the real world well now let's look at the history in the real world also secret I mean the events are not but the documents are uh by 1948 the state department had recognized explicitly that the Nationalist movement of Indochina was led by hoochi Min and the Viet men the anti- French Resistance uh and they recognized that there is really no alternative there's no expedient short of alternative that could be concocted however they also recognized that that's un acceptable the reason it's unacceptable is that a nationalist movement in Vietnam under the leadership of the vietn men might very well be successful in Social and economic development and if it were successful then uh that invokes a certain Theory which we call sometimes the Domino Theory but actually to be historically accurate we really to call it the rotten apple Theory because that's the image that's constantly used uh the idea is that one rotten apple in the barrel May infect the whole Barrel that is if one country undertakes successful social and economic development independent of the United States other countries might try to do the same thing people next across the border is going to say why not us you know and then the rot May spread as the planners put it if you think I'm kidding you to read the documents the rot of Social and economic de development that would be success as Kissinger put it in with regard to aende the in the the uh the contagion May spread and infect other regions these disease metaphors are very commonly used used and you can see why and it's really frightening that people are stealing our resources all over the place uh and uh so so according to the rotten apple theory if you which then became you know the Domino Theory if uh uh if there is successful social and economic development although Vietnam isn't all that important the right to Rob Vietnam was not all that important though Eisenhower made all sorts of speeches about tin and tungston and so on but mainly it wasn't that the problem was that the rock might spread and therefore the the sort of cancerous growth had to be stopped at its source uh so we therefore uh supported the French in their effort to reconquer their former colony and by the end of that war which was 1954 when the French pulled out we were providing about 80% of the costs uh that was a very serious War about half a million people half a million Vietnamese died during that period uh well that was 1954 the French pulled out we came rather close to using nuclear weapons at that time the United States was really intent on preventing the rot from spreading the French pulled out there was a political settlement the United States moved in blocked the political settlement uh installed in South Vietnam the kind of government that we're very familiar within our history we installed a typical Latin American Terror and torture State the kind we have a lot of practice with and it immediately blocked the political settlement but it also turned to the task of massacring the domestic population again that's what we know about from our own history uh the government that we installed uh killed off about 70,000 or 880,000 people by about 1960 which is again not a small number uh this had the the uh had the effect that it often has namely it aroused resistance kind of an odd phenomenon that nobody understands and that of course proved that the Russians are coming as it also always does uh by 1960 when Kennedy 61 when Kennedy came in there was a problem the government that we had established which everybody in Washington knew had no popular base was collapsing because now there was resistance after this massacre uh and what were we going to do so what Kennedy did and this is instructive what Kennedy did was simply to attack South Vietnam in 1961 and 62 the American Air Force was sent to bomb South Vietnam no subterfuges American planes from the American Air Force started extensive bombing and defoliation in South Vietnam this was part of a broad program intended to drive several million people maybe up to 7 million people or so into concentration camps which we call strategic hamlets where they would be surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards and as we put it protected from the gorillas who as we conceded they were willingly supporting well that was that program when any other country does that we call it aggression that's like what the Russians are doing in Afghanistan but when we do it it's defense in fact the extent you know the extent of the um cility of the liberal intelligen on this is kind of remarkable for example Arthur Schlesinger again the anti-war leader and let me keep to the critics because they're by far the more interesting uh Schlesinger has a book about this period uh called a thousand days history of the Kennedy administration and he talks about the year 1962 when this attack began he says 1962 was not a bad year he says aggression was checked in Vietnam meaning the aggression of the Vietnamese against us was checked by our attack against South Vietnam that's what happened in 1962 but as that gets filtered into party history its aggression is checked in South Vietnam this was explained rather nicely by another hero of the liberal Pantheon adlay Stevenson at the United Nations uh he said that in Vietnam we are engaged in defense against what he called internal aggression it's a lovely orwellian concept or well wasn't smart enough to dream it up we're defending ourselves against the internal aggression of the Vietnamese in Vietnam as we do in many parts of the world well uh that was the early 60s meanwhile the Kennedy then the Johnson Administration continued the war extended the war against South Vietnam they overthrew Government after government because they couldn't find anyone who was sufficiently enthusiastic to support our escalation of the war against the South uh they blocked every political settlement they blocked neutralization they also understood exactly what they were doing nothing about lofty intentions or you know benevolence or anything like this they understood exactly what they were doing it's explained very well by government Scholars for example Douglas Pike who was the leading government scholar on the vietcom and who writes about wrote at the time about this period that it was obviously impossible to accept the political settlement because he said we could not expect our Mino to compete politically with their whale well obviously you can't have a political settlement if they have a whale and we have a minnow can't have democracy under those circumstances so we and we couldn't nourish the whale it was minnow so we had to do is destroy the whale so therefore we had to attack South Vietnam no lofly intentions nothing else this is just ordinary consequences of the canones geopolitical thoughts that I described well that takes us to about 1965 by 1965 the United States had killed off about 160,000 people or more in South Vietnam those are not small numbers uh give some comparisons later if you like but they do they compare with Paul pot for instance uh the real facts uh that's before we got into the war officially about 160,000 were killed in 1965 uh the government was again collapsing we had we had to carry out an extensive land invasion of South Vietnam uh we also started started the the systematic bomb we had then been bombing South Vietnam for about 3 years but that's when the systematic bom bombardment began like B52 bombings in the makeon Delta and so on uh we also attacked the north at that time uh the period from 65 to 75 I won't go into anymore the United States extended the war also to Laos and Cambodia the total casualties during that period are probably in the neighborhood of about 3 million in Vietnam and maybe 3/4 of a million or so in or maybe close to a million in Laos and Cambodia well you add it all up it comes to about 5 million casualties which is a lot the land was ravaged uh the societies were destroyed particularly in South Vietnam where the popular movements were wiped out uh it the there are millions and millions of refugees uh the uh by 1970 I should say it was pretty obvious that the end result was going to be either just you know total annihilation of the place or else a North Vietnamese takeover that's what I myself wrote In 1970 that it would end up with the North Vietnamese takeover for the very simple reason that every other indigenous Society was destroyed so there' be nothing left except the North Vietnamese that's pretty much what happened 5 years later and that consequence of American savagery is now used as a retrospective justification for it see look the North Vietnamese have taken over we were right to destroy South Vietnam uh that's again a propaganda operation that Geral would have admired but it's intriguing to notice that it goes on in the media with no comment you know nobody can comment on it well again that tells us something the end result of all of this is that the United States won a partial Victory this is called a defeat in Vietnam but that's because they misunder one thing that all the media retrospectives agreed on was that the United States was defeated they say that's indubitable it happens to be untrue in fact virtually anything that stated as undub in the propaganda system is probably false that's a good rule of thumb and this is one such thing the United States wasn't defeated and couldn't be defeated a country this powerful can't be defeated it can only be partially defeated and we won major objective uh namely the rotten apple Theory isn't going to work you know the chances that Vietnam will be a model of Social and economic development for anybody else are very low they'll be lucky to survive after this assault and that's a very significant Victory when you think about what the real reasons were not the lofty intentions and so on which are you know to pacify the population but the real thinking that's a victory and we've been ensuring it ever since uh the post-war American policy is designed to guarantee that there will be a maximum of of Oppression and suffering and also brutality in Indochina so we've refused reparations which we certainly owe them we've refused Aid we've blocked trade we've blocked aid from International organizations uh we've tried to prevent other countries from aiding them for example just I mean the the level of sism that was achieved and this is kind of hard to imagine sometimes uh one of the things that the United States did in the war against Vietnam was to destroy most of the Buffalo well that's a peasant you know a peasant Society Buffalo means track actors fertilizers and so on uh and uh uh in fact like the Washington Post publishes pictures of peasants pulling plows uh and this is supposed to be proof of communist iniquity you know actually those pictures were in fact Fabrications of tha intelligence very likely but they could have gotten real pictures if they wanted uh and the reason why peasants are pulling plows is because we killed the Buffalo Well India tried to send 100 Buffalo which is nothing you know and the United States tried to block it by blocking food for peace Aid Believe It or Not uh menites tried to send pencils to Cambodia Government tried to block it Oxfam tried to send solar pumps to Cambodia they tried to block it you know shovels to LA to dig up unexploded ordinance nothing is allowed you know that country has to suffer maximally so that we can then use that suffering to justify the attack and to justify similar attacks against other countries that's the postwar I mean the uh President Carter in one of his sermons about human rights literally said the following he said that we owe Vietnam no debt he said because the destruction was Mutual now you know that's a statement that's that's a statement that that bears comparison to to Stalin or Hitler actually but it passed without a mention there wasn't a comment on it in the American Press yep the destruction was Mutual just of walk around the streets of Washington and Boston and you can see it's just like you know it's like Vin so uh and you know and but the fact again that this this statement could be made this monstrous statement could be made without comment again that tells you something about the manufacturer of consent the level of indoctrination well in fact all of this was a Triumph of the manufacturer of consent again among the educated part of the population less so elsewhere where the Vietnam syndrome remains well let me briefly turn to Central America and draw a few parallels I won't go through the whole history because it's too long and horrifying the United States has in fact been tormenting Central America for well for over 130 years now actually back to 1800 if you pursue it in all of its gury detail in 1854 the first major military uh attack took place this was against Nicaragua uh in 1854 the American Navy burned down a towns Port Town San Juan delnorte uh in Nicaragua the re this was not a capricious act I should say it was an act of Revenge uh what had happened is that an American millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt had sailed his yacht into the town and the port officials had tried to Levy charges against it so in retaliation the Navy burned the town down uh that town was uh captured about a year ago briefly for a couple days by contess and the Press made a big fuss about it but they kind of omitted the history which is interesting that was 1854 uh through this Century America the United States for long periods inv invaded and occupied Haiti the Dominican Republic Nicaragua um Panama Honduras country after country virtually every country that we invaded and occupied we left after you know ravaging it and so on in Haiti reinstating slavery and torturing and so on we left murderous military dictators Who Remain tro uh Samoa the DU and so on that's the characteristic result uh without going into details the whole region has been turned into a kind of a horror chamber one of the worst in the world with slave slavery of mass starvation while crops are turned while crop lands are turned to export uh torture murder I mean any horror you can think of uh that's an an interesting reflection of American History if this in a really free Society this kind of stuff would be taught in elementary school but here it's suppressed uh and the extent to which it suppressed is again remarkable you can take a look this morning at the New York Times where there's an oped by uh the editor of foreign policy the more liberal of the general foreign policy journals in which he describes how awful Central America is and he gives all the reasons I mean the Spanish you know colonization the culture and so on and so forth one reason happens to be missing you know guess which one uh that's a level of cowardice and dishonesty which again is very hard to duplicate uh elsewhere but is absolutely characteristic here well that's Central americ General let's take a look at El Salvador in particular uh in El Salvador in 1932 there was a mass murder uh maybe 20 or 30,000 peasants were killed and the country was traumatized and disciplined uh the dictator who carried it out ran an election for the benefit of the United States in which he was the only candidate and we duly recognized him uh it everything was fine you know just normal torture and starvation and so on until about 1960 when there was a reformist officers coup which looked like it might change the situation uh the Kennedy administration blocked it supported a counter coup restore the dictatorship uh the again things were quiet through the 60s uh in 1972 there was an election uh the people who were elected were dwarte and guo Uno now head of the um the political organization associated with the guerillas uh that however the election was immediately overthrown by a military coup backed by the United States involving the participation of the two two of the most loyal and murderous us allies Guatemala and Nicaragua dwarte uh came to Wasing waston at that time uh nobody was interested uh the only Senators who people a congressman who would even talk to him were Kennedy and Tom Harkin rest didn't care the Press didn't care and so on that's expresses our interest in elections uh the same thing happened in 1977 again no interest uh in fact everything was fine know it was under a military dictator just the normal story however there were two developments that were worrisome the first was what was happening in Nicaragua in 19 1979 samoza who was the most loyal American Ally uh was overthrown and it was be the Carter Administration was beginning to be concerned that the same thing might happen in El Salvador in the United States might also lose control there the second thing that was happening was even more threatening there was a growth through n the 1970s of what they called their popular organizations now these typically started from things like say Bible study groups run by the church which turned into self-help organizations which sometimes became peasant cooperatives or peas associations and unions and so on and so forth in fact there was the beginning of the development of of uh popular organizations in which people could actually participate uh and that's intolerable for a very simple reason That's the basis for democracy you can't have democracy in any meaningful sense if isolated individuals have to face concentrated power alone uh if that's what if that's the system you've got then democracy amounts to pushing a lever once every couple of years to select choose between representatives of one or another group that has a base in the private elsewhere usually the private economy real democracy means participation it means people it means isolated individuals with limited resources can pool those resources can have ideas you know can exchange information can have access to information can can put forth programs and can figure out ways to implement those programs on the political agenda unless you've got that you don't have any democracy now there's one group of course that has that well whatever groups there are that that own the private economy typically have that ability but nobody else does uh and that's a prerequisite to democracy and that was beginning to develop in El Salvador in the 70s which is very frightening uh as you can see from the geopolitical considerations that I mentioned uh well what did the United States do in 1979 The Carter Administration October 79 backed the reformist coup a military coup which overthrew the dictatorship The Carter Administration who they were afraid of was going to all the Carter Administration however insisted that the most reactionary and brutal military elements be dominant in the Hun killings rapidly increased by early 1980 a few months later the group had collapsed the left Christian democrats the Socialists the reformist Military Officers were out and power was back in the hands of the usual Thugs who we support in Latin America at that point uh Jose Napoleon Duarte came in to provide a cover for what he knew what was going to happen we knew was going to happen next namely a huge Massacre to try to crush the popular organizations and he's been playing that role ever since much to the Applause of the American audience which regards this as a a great proof of you know that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize or something like that uh that was early 1980 in February in right at that time the Archbishop Archbishop Romero uh wrote a letter to Carter a important letter in which he pleaded with Carter not to send military aid the reason he said was that military aid would be used to increase the repression and to destroy the popular organizations which he said are fighting for the fundamental human rights but of course that was the very essence of American policy so Carter naturally sent the aid uh he sent it again with an astonishing orwellian phrase uh namely he said he went to the Congress he said we have to send the military aid so that the military can play a more significant role in uh reforms he knew exactly what the reforms were going to be they were exactly what the Archbishop said namely destruction of the uh increasing the repression and destruction of the uh popular organizations well that's what happened exactly as predictable and predicted a couple of weeks later the Archbishop was assassinated uh in May 1980 Carter's war against the peasantry began with major massacres usually in areas designated for land reform which provided a kind of cover for the massacres in June the University was attacked and destroyed many people killed the building buildings pillaged and destroyed uh in November the political opposition was massacred meanwhile the independent press was wiped out we don't believe in censorship in the United States what we believe in is what we did in El Salvador namely you blow up the newspaper you take the editor out and you hack into pieces with the machete and so on and so forth and pretty soon there's no need for censorship so by the there isn't any censorship in El Salvador uh that's uh that was the Carter War about 10,000 people killed during during that one mostly suppressed in the Press here I should say uh dwares himself said that the masses were with the guerillas at that time but he felt better afterwards he said now they're not anymore which is probably true after you're subjected to an experience like that uh Carter's war against the popular organizations was a success uh they were destroyed but again it had the usual consequence people began to flock to the gorillas which proves that the Russians are coming that period is very similar to what happened in Vietnam in the 19 in the late 1950 very similar check it out you find very much the same was happening well at that point Reagan came in uh you what he would have expected to do is exactly what Kennedy did namely escalate the war by American bombing he didn't he tried but he didn't the reason he didn't was because the country this country has changed a lot in the past 20 years when Kennedy attacked South Vietnam there was virtually no protest in fact as I mentioned that event doesn't exist in American history which is an indication of the of the uh depth of indoctrination of the period but that's not true anymore when Reagan began to move towards direct aggression against El Salvador there was a very substantial popular response and the government had to back off they've had to use more devious methods to T out Mass Slaughter in El Salvador which have been very brutal and destructive but it's still short of B52 bombing and so on and so forth well Reagan picked it up where Carter left off by the end of 19 by the end of 1981 according to church sources in El Salvador about 30,000 people had been killed and about 600,000 refugees have been created uh and as the church announced that Jean Kirkpatrick made a speech in which he extolled the moral quality of the government that was doing it uh those figures have incidentally been approximately doubled since uh well that's El Salvador it's still going on there's no commentary on it there's no debate over it uh it's considered among reasonable people among reasonable Humane people it's considered simply our right to carry out mass murder in El Salvador so there's nothing to debate nothing in Congress about it nothing in the Press very little reported if you want to learn about it you've got to go to the reports of Human Rights organizations which document in detail the indiscriminate murder carried out by the Air Force with direct you know with American control and coordination uh the torture in the prisons and so on and so forth but in the press nothing it's just a marvelous tribute to Our Success that this is happening uh there is some protest about Nicaragua and that again tells you something about the nature of the propaganda system and the way the government sets the terms of debate inally here to here the peace movement has fallen into the Trap totally uh let me illustrates very similar to what happened in the mid-60s in the mid-60s uh there was considerable protest about the war against North Vietnam the bombing of North Vietnam but very little protest about the bombing of South Vietnam which was far more intense and far more destructive uh and the ground war against South Vietnam even more so the protest was against the war against the North and the reason was that that carried potential costs for us uh the war against the South has no costs we just murdered defenseless people you know been supp the thing uh in fact that's kind of a historical vocation you might say uh in uh the war against the north however is problematic uh it could bring in the Chinese you know could bring in the Russian has International complications it's another country you know so therefore there was protest about it the Pentagon incidentally noticed this mcnam for example points out in secret documents that the protest is against the bombing of the north not against the more intensive bombing of the South and Drew the appropriate conclusions notice how the story is being replayed today the pro the the attack against Nicaragua is bad enough in fact very bad but it's nothing like the attack against El Salvador I mean not remotely like it uh but the protest is against the attack on Nicaragua the government has framed the debate so that you're allowed to discuss whether the United States is allow is um should or should not attack Nicaragua uh but you're not allowed to discuss whether we have the right to attack El Salvador that's just a given that's out of discussion the peace movement has fallen into the Trap totally uh the pledge of resistance for example uh is a pledge of resistance if the government escalates the war against Nicaragua there is no pledge of resistance if the government continues the war against Salvador again that's a given uh lots of people were arrested me included last week about the Embargo against Nicaragua but nobody was arrested and there was no demonstration about the Mass Slaughter being conducted in El Salvador that's a given again again this illustrates uh the enormous power of the state to set the terms of discussion to frame the discussion in terms acceptable to it the debate over Nicaragua is more or less acceptable because that could just as the war as the debate over North Vietnam was acceptable because kind of lying behind that is the idea that somehow you can it can be construed in defensive terms it can be construed as defense of El Salvador against somebody and then you can argue about whether there's really an attack or not but the attack against South Vietnam or the attack against El Salvador that can't be construed in any terms other than Mass Slaughter uh and in fact if you look at its reasons they're obvious to prevent exactly the reasons that the Archbishop gave namely to destroy the popular organizations that are fighting for the people's fundamental human rights there's no way to make that tolerable to the propaganda system so therefore you got to suppress it and we all play along should say myself included uh the the peace movement included we all play along because we're so effectively brainwash well all of that uh illustrates once again the triumphs of the manufacturer of consent in a society with a sophisticated uh and class conscious ruling class that learns that thinks that has resources uh that plans uh and that in fact controls the means of indoctrination uh as long as the educated classes accept the appropriate degree of cility the same story could be repeated with regard to the Middle East with regard to the so-called arms race and all sorts of other things and also domestic issues no time for that well when a superpower uh gains the ability to when it develops an effective system of indoctrination then the World becomes a very dangerous place uh we here should be able to come to understand these crucial features of our society and also to act to change them the fate of many millions of people throughout the world and very likely the fate of human civilization depends quite directly I think on our willingness to undertake that task and to carry it forth with honesty and courage and determination than what I said was I I I thank uh Professor Chomsky for mentioning the fact that the peace movement has not picked up very much on the slaughter of citizens in El Salvador however part of the peace movement has that part is an organization known as cispus uh which is a solidarity Organization for El Salvador and cisus has in fact been running a campaign uh since early this spring uh posing the bombing in El Salvador one of the problems is of course that um it's a small organization in the United States and the Congress hasn't uh followed along but I will say that I have brochures outside at the casa table where you can send money and you can do whatever is possible and I'm sure gome can tell you some of the things that we as American citizens can do but I have brochures describing the bombing campaign in El Salvador and suggest in means for overcoming the bombing campaign in El Salvador and if everybody would come to the next Casa meeting which is the first Wednesday uh in the month of June right here 7 o'clock at the downstairs conference room we meet every wedes every first Wednesday and third Monday of the month at 7:00 we'll give you things to do and I think as n has pointed out that's our only hope in this struggle I certainly endorse that this the really Scandal the way we've let that go by let me just make one comment about that dwarte who's the official hero around here recently announced that he's not going to accept any more human rights charges from the church human right rights office uh to T gal because he said it's allied with people who are controlled by the subversives that is the church is all Communists that's the guy who's the big Democrat and he also said at that time that the Air Force is not engaged in any indiscriminate attacks against civilians it's only engaged in uh air attacks supporting ground forces the oppos the contrary of that is described in very graphic and gory detail uh in a series of America's watch reports uh in the last couple of months this one last month one last August and one last April that's the man who uh everyone is lating you know as the next Nobel Peace Prize U uh aure yeah how do you know what's in the SEC secret oh because again this is a very open Society more so than any other in the world and secret documents do get released so the documents that I was quoting in fact have all been released they were top secret documents I'm sorry uh there's also a very valuable store of documents which were uh released thank liberated we might say thanks to Dan ellsburg namely the Pentagon papers and that's particularly valuable because usually you don't get access to a government secret documents unless the government decides to release them that was a case where the government didn't decide to release them and in fact uh they're very interesting however I should say that they're not all that different from the public documents that have been released uh we have act this you know I I don't know what would happen if Scholars and journalists ever started using the documentary record maybe at that point they'd stop releasing it but the fact of the matter is they do release it it sort of doesn't matter too much because nobody ever sees it except some you know fanatics but uh it's there if you want to look and in fact it's there there's you know there books and articles discussing it too how did it happen that the New York Times given theil well you have to remember when it was that was 1972 And there's some important things to bear in mind here uh by 19 in in January 1968 the Ted offensive took place now the Ted offensive changed the calculation of costs of American Elites they decided there was a question how to react to the Ted Ted offenseive was an astonishing event I mean throughout South Vietnam and just about every city there was a coordinated we even the term is very misleading I mean it it's you know the term again reflects the indoctrination system it's it's a logical impossibility for the South Vietnamese to carry out an offensive in South Vietnam it wasn't an offensive it was a it was an uprising against the aggressors that's what we ought to call it but the Tet Uprising uh took place in a coordinated fashion in just about every city in South Vietnam the Americans had we had over half million troops there there were very few North Vietnamese there in fact only about 50,000 North Vietnamese mostly at the border they were probably outnumbered at the time by the Thai and Korean mercenaries that we had there and the United States just dwarfed anyone nobody got had an inkling of it you know there's this hu this coordinated Mass Uprising in city after city which the United States which just was controlling the whole society had no inkling of that's an indication of the extent of the popular involvement in it uh they the the they now like to say that the result was a victory for the United States and in a certain sense that's true the United States had such enormous F fire power that it was able to wipe out huge numbers of South Vietnamese uh so in that sense of course it was a victory but it frightened people in Washington it made them recognize that it was going to be a long drawn out War well the question arose as to whether to send more troops and the deliberations are interesting and instructive The Joint Chiefs were opposed to sending more troops and one of their reasons was that they thought those troops would be needed here for civil disorder control uh that tells you something uh the uh and they spelled it out they they mentioned groups that were going to be a problem youth women others no literally know uh and they literally felt that they had to keep the troops here you know also the United the government was worried about that time about at the time of the fact that the Army was collapsing the American Army much to its credit I should say disintegrated uh and uh that's not a small fact the United States again is unique another element of American uniqueness is that other Imperial Powers have not used citizens armies for colonial wars That's Unique it it was a bad mistake uh for a colonial war you need professional Killers you need people like the French Foreign Legion you know ex-nazis that's what the U French used they didn't send the conscript Army to Vietnam the British didn't use conscript armies they used professional Killers often Hill tribesmen or people who were trained to be professional murderers you'll notice in South Africa they do the same thing a lot of the killing is done by professional killers taken from the oppressed communities themselves it's very typical incidentally a typical Colonial practice the United States made a mistake it sent a citizen's Army and uh you can't get Ordinary People off the streets uh to become professional murderers and that's what a colonial war is it means going into a village and you know killing women and children and old men and that sort of business uh so uh that didn't work and the Army began to collapse and that was a problem well uh also another thing and here again see the a calc a decis decision was made in early 1968 uh and it's on record to cut back the War uh that's when Johnson decided not to run and all sorts of things changed uh it was just getting too costly they couldn't win the war at an appre at at a at a at a a proper cost well then Nixon came in and tried to continue the war and a lot of the business Community was against him very strongly against him they felt it was harming the American position in international trade it was weakening the dollar it was causing stagflation it was causing domestic uproar which they didn't want they want a nice quiet population uh and for all these reasons they really wanted to stop it there was a real split within the ruling class if you want and it's in that context that the New York Times published The Pentagon Papers uh it's also in that context that Watergate took place uh Watergate which was in my view largely a farce was uh uh partly a reaction to What strong elements of the ruling class regarded as ni's crimes against them and one of them was just dragging this war on too far when they figured they had achieved what they wanted you know Vietnam was not going to recover now let's get out and turn to something more important uh however I should say that the release of the Pentagon papers and I think I don't know how smart the New York Times editors are but the fact is that the release of the Pentagon papers had almost no effect because they've been suppressed they've been suppressed as effectively as if they had never been released uh if you look at the take a look at the books that are coming out say Carno you know or certainly the retrospectives but even the scholarly books and you'll notice that the material in there is not used see in fact uh the material in there said just tells the wrong story for example the material on the planning is very extensive in the Pentagon papers and that's never used if people refer to the Pentagon papers at all which they rarely do even in scholarly work it's usually stuff about the s64 or 1965 when there were when there were mainly tactical questions I mean all the major decisions already been made you know there only a question of how to implement things and then you can discuss it did we use the right tactics you know should we done it this way that way but the major stuff from the late 40s and through the 50s that's virtually never discussed uh and there's a lot of important material in the Pentagon papers I could mention some things but it's all been suppressed so it's just as well it's just as if it didn't get released just to give you an indication of this there's the U the the beacon press published the four volumes of the Pentagon papers and they published a fifth volume which is an index and the index includes a collection of essays on the Pentagon papers by Gabriel calco and John daer and lots of lots of good essays I think they're good I edited the volume but uh the it's it that volume is practically unsold few thousand copies were sold of that volume and that tells you something and of course a lot of the sales are the people who wanted the essays now anybody who's going to use the Pentagon paper needs that volume you can can't use a four volume work without an index okay so the fact that nobody was buying the volume including even University libraries means that they didn't intend that anybody would ever look at them okay and in fact that's what's happened uh what's your understanding of your asss that people to vot against their own interest not against independent of yeah right I understand yeah you feel disenfranchised you just vot someone that makes you feel why does it make them yeah okay so the question is why do people vote against their own interests and just in favor of somebody who makes them feel good if they feel disenfranchised well uh I think that reflects a certain degree of sophistication actually uh if you recognize that the election is a PR game and it's for show and it's sort of fun like a circus so you might as well be part of it uh and there's a lot of Pola and you know it's exciting and so on then who should you vote for well you know the guy who has a nice smile let's say or the guy who makes you feel good when you sort of uh you know watch them on television or something why not you know I think that's probably the way most people think that's why you that's why you get see every everyone talks about the Reagan Landslide well just take a close look at the Reagan Landslide uh 53% of the PO of the electorate voted way below any other country of that 59% voted for Reagan which if you do the arithmetic means he got a I forget what like 32% of the vote of that roughly 32% of the vote about 2/3 I think it was 60% to be precise said that they hoped that his his proposals would not be enacted okay uh of the when the detailed polling was done of exits from polls when they checked people's attitudes it turned out that about I think I forget I think the figure was about 4% of the people who voted for Reagan said they strongly approved of his programs what that means is that the landslide consisted of something maybe 2% of the electorate okay that's the landslide everybody's talking about now why did people do it well you know well I think the failure to vote I I I think we learned something from the fact that the failure to vote was socioeconomically localized as it always is people you know the people who don't vote didn't see anything in it for them uh of the people who did vote uh a lot voted I mean some voted because you know I mean like I have friends in fact one one friend of mine who was an ex malist I should say explained to me that he voted for Reagan because Reagan's been good to him which is true people in our income group Reagan's been very good to all you do have to do is look at the redistribution of real disposable income during the Reagan years and uh it's a sort of a straight line if you if you break the population up into segments depending on income you know low to high and you ask what's happened to real disposable income is going like that you know it's fallen for the lowest risen for the highest and essentially straight all the way across so there are people who know that they can see you know the rich can see that stealing from the poor is good to the rich you know so they vote for Reagan uh but for much of the population it's just a matter of of kind of recognizing the public relations gain you could actually see that you see the American political commentary is very interesting so you Rec I mean you know you remember the last election uh the uh let like take the debates okay what happened in the debates you remember the commentary on the debates the commentary was about like whether Mandel wore the right tie you know or whether Geraldine Ferraro looked down instead of at the camera you know or whether you know Reagan could sort of get by in a half an hour without making some totally idiotic Gap I mean that was the uh that was the level of the commentary the the nobody talk about any issues because they really couldn't find any issues you know and in fact issues are regarded to be irrelevant the the level of cynicism in the FED in the National campaigns is really quite remarkable so for example during the at the Kennedy administration here here's a case in point uh during the Kennedy administration in the 1960 campaign Kennedy hired a firm uh run by couple of MIT political scientists which is how I know about it called Simon Maddox uh one of them uh was in fact a student of the guy Harold lasswell who I mentioned before and what this company was going to do was the following just think of this and the cynicism is mindblowing this company uh which had a lot of computers and all that kind of business had broken the population up into a lots and lots of categories you know like Polish women from 38 to 42 and things like that all sorts of categories and what and they claimed to have a method whereby they could tell for any statement that you made how people in those categories were going to react to it you know like whether they would like it this much or that much and so on and then using you know some statistical means and computer and stuff you could determine the impact across these various voting groups of any particular statement you made and the point of selling this to the Kennedy campaign was that then they could adjust they could decide what to say uh on the basis of how you would it would sort of average out over these various voting groups that they were trying to appeal to well what that mean I mean that means that a complete understanding that what you say is totally irrelevant to what you're going to do you know well I think a lot of the population understands that too and if so you might just as well vote for whoever makes you feel good or not vote at all andly Europe is well behind us on this but they're catching up they'll have packaged elections too pretty soon by the time they learn the pr tricks that and the voter management tricks that we've developed you you were talking about the level of commentary about the presidential debates I thought I thought there was one interesting outcome of that he one of the sort of Mainline American uh Network com commentors refer to George Bush speaking with geralo being George Bush is being frill I see usually went the other way okay yeah all right that's the same sort of thing I mean it's you know style is the only thing that counts because they all understand at some level that the substance is elsewhere and in fact you know probably if you sort of look at the last election it was really a debate over there was a there were policy decisions like should we continue to pour money into military expenditures as a way of revitalizing the economy or should we worry about the debt and so on that's those are the real issues but that's not what people debated couple of years ago you were describing the very Vol situation the Middle East russan Manning s missiles Syria I believe if I heard correctly years ago at it as a very Danger esal Poss in the Middle East yeah could you hear well the comment was that I had said a couple of years ago that probably around 82 that would have been I guess that uh the uh Russian Manning of uh Sam missiles in Syria and Lebanon uh ra raised the power the likelihood of superpower confrontation in fact one of the consequences the Israeli invasion of Lebanon Israel used High sophisticated American Technology to destroy a sort of second level uh Soviet air defense system as part of that was part of the attack against Syria uh during the during that war and the Russians responded as you'd Imagine by moving in a high level U sophisticated air defense system and sending American estimates were about 7,000 Soviet troops to to to demand them that number's probably reduced it a little bit since and I me I said at the time that that brought the world very close to a superpower confrontation as indeed it did well since that time you know the thing has sort of oscillated up and back it was it's been worse in some periods Less in others During the period when the United States was bombing when they say the New Jersey Battleship New Jersey was bombing the hills above Beirut it was very dangerous they were probably killing Russians uh the Russians didn't respond that time but it could have blown up uh at the at this particular moment it happen the tensions happen to have been relaxed a little and the reason is that the United States has essentially sort of authorized Syria to try to settle the Lebanon Problem by itself however it's just on the border you know I mean sooner or later Israel is going to have to attack Syria uh and they know it they're discussing it uh and there are very good reasons for it uh in a in the situation of military the The crucial issue in the Middle East is whether there's going to be a political settlement now the United States is the main factor in blocking the political settlement that's another thing that's never discussed here uh the United States has been the major element blocking any political settlement there and of course Israel too because it doesn't want a political settlement but they can do it as long as we back it uh and as long as there's no political settlement and there is a military confrontation Israel cannot allow any Arab state or any combination of Arab states to begin to approach it in military strength I mean that's just on you know perfect reasonable grounds because if if there is a confrontation it could lose and it could get wiped out so therefore they're going to have to attack Syria pretty soon uh and they're talking about it uh and they're trying to figure out you know conditions and so on and that could very well lead again to a superpower confrontation uh that area is the area that's really likely to start the next World War this incidentally is not just my opinion it's the opinion of virtually every analyst so for example there was a there was a secret Air Force document leaked in this case whoever asked about these things leaked the Press but as far as I know not published in the American press it was published in the Canadian press uh called Air Force 2000 which was a planning you know sort of estimating the likelihood of War up to the year 2000 and they said like everybody that the chance of a war breaking out in Europe is very slight the chance of a war breaking out in the third world is very high superpower war and they said the Middle East is the main area the Middle East they said is they said what they said is this as long as the Arab Israeli conflict is not settled by political settlement uh the chances for Global Peace are remote and the chance of a nuclear war by the year 2000 are quite High uh for people who are involved in the disarmament movement I should say this ought to be their primary concern if they're reasonable it's a lot more I mean it's bad enough to have Star Wars and MX and all that sort of business but this is much more dangerous yeah for blocking a political settlement well what's the American objective in blocking a political settlement well this is a complicated business it goes back to what the whole American geopolitical planning has strategic planning has been for the Middle East and the the the concept that has been developed over the years is that as everywhere in the world we have we have the same enemy in the Middle East we have everywhere else namely the IND ous population uh what's called over there radical Arab nationalism where radical is a technical term radical nationalism means the nationalism of anybody who doesn't follow orders it's opposed to what's called moderate nationalism which is the nationalism of those who do follow orders again this has nothing to do with political position or anything else by the late 1950s uh again on the basis of secret documents released uh we know that the United States had decided had recognized that to oppose radical Arab nationalism it would probably be necessary to support Israel as a military force that position got strengthened through the 60s uh uh especially with Israel's military victory in ' 67 uh and uh Israel began to be understood as what's now called a strategic asset uh in the context of the Nixon Doctrine around 1970 this was further reaffirmed the Nixon Doctrine you remember was a recognition that the United States could not police the World by itself we didn't have the power anymore relatively to do policing action everywhere we needed surrogate States uh and in the Middle East the surrogate states were supposed to be Israel and Iran under the Sha and American Aid to Israel shot up at that point uh By 1979 the Sha had fallen and Israel was left as the last surrogate State uh American policy has been to try to turn Israel into a militarized state highly militarized state with lacking an independent economy uh so that it's complet completely dependent on the United States for survival a it's important for it to be a pariah state so therefore it can't get support from anyone else and a kind of a pressure that we like an attack dog you know that we can use when we need it to guarantee rather narrowly conceived American interests in the Middle East and also to use elsewhere it's very convenient for a superpower that's trying to Run the World by force it's very convenient for it to have a militarily advanced technologically advanced uh State dedicated to war with a trained population and nowhere else to look you know no other means of survival other than dependence on us you can use it all over the place we've used it in Africa and Asia but primarily in Latin America so for example the massacres in Guatemala in the early part of the Reagan Administration which were enormous you know thousands if not tens of thousands of people were massacred the Reagan Administration was blocked from conducting limit directly by Congressional human rights legislation so it was able to use use Israel to do it and that's valuable for a superpower uh in the people who support this position are called supporters of Israel that's another nice orwellian phrase they're actually supporters of Israel's destruction you know because that's what it's leading to uh but uh that's another story uh that's I think that's the sort of encapsulated the thinking behind it and of course that's inconsistent with the political settlement a political settlement would just mean that Israel would be you know something like the Switzerland of the Middle East but that's no use we want it to be the pressure of the Middle East and that requires a military conflict so we've blocked any political Settlements a political settlement would mean that Israel would have to withdraw to something like the 67 borders and then it would be you could have a police peace peaceful settlement in those terms but not with a really powerful military State there that can be that's in a state of conflict and therefore you know requires military support and is available for military uses pardon I'm sorry I can't see very well there yeah could you yeah well for one thing I'm not sure they're all that aware uh but basically they kind of agree with it you know the the Soviet Union since in in the second world during the second world were the Soviet Union we don't have their documents but we can see pretty well what they were up to the Soviet Union has been in favor of U uh what is called dayon dayon is a sharing in World Management on the part of the two superpowers where each one I where they are of course the junior partner because they're weaker but where each allows the other to run its own do its own domain without too much interference so we allow them to run their domain and they allow us to run our domain most most it and that's essentially what they've been pressing since the late' 40s without too much change incidentally a little picking away at the periphery but uh essentially that's Soviet policy we occasionally agree to that like during the years of dayon in the early 70s we for a period agreed to that but then for various reasons mainly having to do I think with the domestic economy and the need for intervention uh we pulled away from it it's not very pretty but it's you know you can understand um you've been talking tonight about how the immorality of our policy and how the different struct support that press and education and through all the study everything you've been doing do you think it's possible to reform those policies um change the B effect having bring them back and to the people's needs through working through the structures that exist through the Press through the educational economic systems what do you think it's necessary to create new structures either or not well I think it's very hard to give an answer to that I think we ought what obviously what you try to do is change the policies as much as you can through existing structures and it's hard to predict the extent to which they'll be resistant to that but I think they will be resistant to it uh but quite independently of that I think we ought to change the internal institutions of our own Society anyway because they're oppressive and uh uh in many ways intolerable and inhuman so even if it turns out contrary to what I believe that you could make a serious change in foreign policy with our present institutions we ought to be trying to change them anyhow again Sera well it depends what you're talking about for example one that we ought to overcome I think I mean to me it's I was talking about this this afternoon if you were here but uh I don't see an enormous difference between a a society in which you have to sell in which you sell yourself to someone and a society in which you rent yourself to someone I mean they seem to be approximately equally inhuman well we agree now that we didn't 100 years ago on the first that slavery is wrong but there's another thing which in the old days used to be called wage slavery which means that you rent yourself to somebody else in order to survive it means that control over resources and production and investment is in the hands of a a separate a particular and rather small group of people and everyone else has the choice of either dying or rent renting themselves to them more or less on their terms uh and I that seems to me a totally intolerable form of human life you know I mean there's no reason to accept that anymore than there was a reason to accept slavery or feudalism or whatever uh and uh that now you know you how do you change that well you try to change it through existing institutions you probably fail in which case you change the institutions which are not Graven and stone you know history hasn't come to an end yeah could you hear what What alternative sources are there informations or yeah uh well first let me say that I think when you read anything including you know what I write uh specifically you got to remember that everybody's got an ax to grind you know and history isn't physics you know I mean in physics the world pretty much controls what you do and makes you honest you can't lie in physics you'll be caught very quickly uh but history isn't like that you know you can lie for a long time and nobody will ever catch you uh and uh the reason is that you know the the intellectual structure of the field is not such that you got the real constraints of the outside world so you pick and choose you know you pick and choose from a massive stuff and you pick what you think is important and there's a lot of subjective judgment and there's a lot of ideology and that should be understood what that means is that anything that you read uh I I try to be as upfront as I can be about where I stand there's also something called objectivity which is a total fraud and what that means is uh accepting the ideology of the established system that's called objectivity uh but you should recognize where somebody's coming from and what they think is important and what their values are and what they're looking for and so on and so forth and then you got to compensate for and there you just have to rely on your own intelligence and understanding there's no answer answer and that's no matter what you read uh that having been said uh there are two points that ought to be made one point is that the mainstream uh indoctrination system happens to contain a lot of information it does for two reasons for one thing because there are people who have to know the facts like business business has to know the facts they got a lot at stake you know and so when you read The Wall Street Journal news news reports not the commentary when you read the news reports they're probably pretty accurate uh and the same is often true in the New York Times news reports now you've got to know how to read them you know so you have to read defense of South Vietnam as attack against South Vietnam you know and things like that uh but once you understand how to read them you know then you can get a lot of information out of them uh and of course you've got to read carefully like you have to compare today's lies against yesterday's lies you know some or for example you read government denials when you read government denials you're often learning what in fact happened quite typically they will not refer to an event but they'll refer to the government denial of it and then you check back and you know you find it happened and so on so there's all sorts of techniques for for you know penetrating the uh the major media on top of that there Al you're of course better off if you read widely so if you have if you can say read you know for example the Manchester Guardian even the weekly Edition uh you will learn things about say Central America that you won't read in the American Press uh like the British press it's not because Britain is such a wonderful country it's just that they don't happen to be the guys who are committing the crimes in Central America so therefore they can write about them more openly uh and uh uh if you read journals like say the nation especially people like Alex cob uh you'll learn an awful lot that'll never be in the American press or even if it's there everybody's not understand it you know uh but he does and uh or you know in these times and such journals we'll have things that either won't like for example uh Terror in Al Salvador has been described and in these times and in the guardian uh but not in the mainstream press that's always been true at the time of the tonen gulf incident for instance when the whole which was a real turning point in the war total fraud government claimed that American ships had been attacked and that was the start of the big attack in Vietnam the press the mainstream press brought bought it 100% but the guardian didn't and told the truth in fact and that turned out to be the truth I mean the americ the New York Guardian uh of course uh you always have you know you always read those things with skepticism like anything but nevertheless U there are times when they'll report things that the mainstream press won't report or they'll understand things that the mainstream press won't understand but ultimately I don't think there's any substitute for just the diligence and intelligence and skepticism a lot of skepticism now see that's one of the ways in which people are kept ignorant you can have all the information there but only a very small number of people are in a position to put forth the effort to try to figure out what's going on you have to be very privileged you know quite privileged before you can even do this you have to have resources you have to have training you know you have to have time time you know you have to have all sorts of things that most people don't have in order even to be able to figure out what's going on that's one reason why the country is sort of safe in having a lot of information available only very few people are going to be able to get at it and you know that's why you need organization I mean if you can group together in organizations you can do what individuals can't do that's crucial that's one reason why the United States has always attempted to block things like political parties or meaningful organizations in which people can participate because that's the way in which isolated individuals can overcome the lack of resources the only way so go to the next c meeting Bas on the that is against sorry I can't hear based on our on the theory that it is against the us against the US interest to have settlement in the Middle East do you really think those moves now that we are seeing by Egypt Israel and jph are orchestrated since they are well do I think that the moves by Israel Jordan and Egypt are orchestrated not really I think it's sort of a dance if you like but I don't think it's orchestrated by the United States it can't possibly get anywhere it can't get anywhere because the United States won't tolerate a political settlement period so it doesn't matter what anybody does over there uh because we we play the decisive role uh and uh a poit everybody knows what a political settlement means and everybody knows that it's been attainable for at least a decade a political settlement means a two-state settlement on something like the pre-june 67 borders with recognized borders and guar territorial guarantees and all that sort of business that's what a political settlement means it would probably work it supported may not be very pretty you know may be very ugly in fact but it would probably work uh it's supported by virtually everybody in the world it's supported by the Soviet Union by Europe by the non-aligned countries by the major Arab states been supported by the mainstream of the PLO for about a decade uh it's only blocked by two categories of rejectionists uh one who we call rejectionists because they're the bad guys is say Libya for instance the other who we don't call rejectionists because it because it's us is the United States in Israel and the United States and Israel have in fact led the rejectionist camp they refuse this settlement and Israel can do it because we support them in their refusal and short of that there is no political settlement you know and uh there is no it is impossible for any group in Israel to uh gain any credibility in their own Society in favor of a political settlement until they get some support from the United States the country is just too dependent on the United States so American opposition to a political settlement uh which in fact is crucially centered in the Jewish community and the other so-called pro-israel communities uh that blocks the possibility of any group in Israel arising that could even push for a political settlement there and so that means there'll be continued conflict no matter what you know no matter what negotiations are going on you you can see I mean this again you know here here's another example of the of the take take look something quite dramatic happened about a year ago in this regard uh about last April in May and it tells you something about the Press last last April and May uh Yasser Arafat proposed explicitly uh negotiations with Israel leading to Mutual recognition he proposed that in uh statements that were widely publicized in in France and England in Greece uh in Asia all over the place uh Israel of course immediately rejected it they don't want Mutual recognition uh the United States ignored it now what about the Press well the press was was fascinating in that case the New York Times And The Washington Post that is the national press they didn't even report it they literally didn't report it uh they refused to run off Eds on it they refused to publish letters about it one reader in Detroit wrote a letter to the New York Times in which he said look you guys are always dumping on arut because he won't negotiate here he has announced negotiation he wants negotiations and mutual recognition don't you think that ought to be reported he actually got a letter back from the foreign editor of the times which is very rare you never get a letter back when you write to a journal uh and even and from particularly from the foreign editor and I have the letter in fact I'm publishing it uh the letter is amazing it says uh we are familiar with the statements by srr thought that you um pointed out to our attention uh however they do not represent a significant change in his position which incidentally is true although you wouldn't know that from reading the New York Times uh and then it goes on to say if Arafat ever calls for uh negotiations and mutual recognition you'll read it on the front page of the New York Times well that's Verbatim what he had called for okay now you just couldn't have a clearer statement saying that at the top editorial level they're not going to allow this to be part of History okay all right that's the New York Times And The Washington Post the the sort of local quality press like say the Boston Globe or the Philadelphia inquire or the LA Times they reported it but they reported it in such a way that you you know you got to really look hard to find it it's there you know so you could find it if you looked the San Francisco Herald or Herald examiner I think it's called which has the reputation of being about the worst paper in the country had a front page headline an inch and a half High running all over the front page saying Arafat the Israel let's talk followed by a long UPI story which gave all the detail well that's the way it should have been treated press now how come how do you explain this well I would I think it's very easy to explain uh the point is that the San Francisco Herald examiner is too unsophisticated to understand what news has to be suppressed so they just make judgment you know on the basis of sign of significance but the New York Times understands very well see the New York Times you have to understand this somebody was talking about reading the Press you see that when you read the New York Times you have to recognize the tremendous burden you know the awesome burden that the editors bear namely they are creating history history is what appears in the New York Times archives nobody's ever going to look at the San Francisco Herald examiner archives right but they are going to look at the New York Times archives if you're a scholar you know what you do is you go to the New York Times archives so it's extremely important to make sure that the right things are there and not the wrong things because that's history and history is important you know so you know again like I said it's kind of an awesome burden and you got to respect those guys and uh uh you can see if you read the Press carefully that there's a difference in the way the times treats crucial issues and the way other less sensitive papers do uh because they have to make sure that history reads the right way so and this just wasn't allowed in history obviously that can't be allowed in history you know so it's out and you'll never find it in a book for instance oh okay there are still some resources an are saying we're going to run out of oil Texas has done 15 years isn't that the grand are that oh that's all true we're going to run out of oil I mean you can worry about the timing uh there have been no big surprises in about this I should say for about 30 years by the late 1940s the oil companies who are the only people who have the information apparently knew pretty much where the oil was and how it was going to last and so on and it's kind of interesting to see what they did about it uh one of the things see one of the things it's very important to realize when you're studying foreign policy planning or even business planning is that it's all done in the short term people very rarely make long-term decisions that's incidentally inherent in capitalism uh if you're in a competitive capitalist economy and you make long-term decisions before you've ever gotten to the long term you've been wiped out in the short term you know like if General Motors let's say say starts putting resources into something that's going to pay off in 10 years they'll be out of business in 2 years because Ford will be working on a 2-year plan so the net effect is that planning is almost always very short term and that carries over to State planning too which is largely by corporate Executives well all right with that background and that has that has to do with a lot of things like take the arms race I mean anybody who thinks knows that the arms race is going to blow up and we'll all get killed but that's in the long term and we only plan for profitability in the short term that's in that's inherent in the system you know uh well take the oil business uh it was everybody in the oil business knew in the early 1950s that American reserves were limited uh the United States in the north the Western hemis well you know the northern part of the Western Hemisphere was in fact the world's major oil producer until 1968 but everybody knew that's going to run out and that the major oil reserves are in the middle e East well you know if you were thinking about long-term American Security what you would do is protect American reserves and use Middle Eastern reserves they did exactly the opposite what they did is set up you know they set up the tax system and all sorts of crazy things so that it was more profitable to exhaust domestic American reserves before turning to Middle Eastern reserves well you know from the point of view of say a 10 or 20 year period That's crazy obviously crazy you know in terms of security or anything else else but that's what they did and they did it because in fact various considerations of short-term profitability dictated that well uh some sometimes they're going to run out of oil and nobody's thinking about it because that's too far off you know we make sure we carry out problem we carry out short-term profitability considerations there's very little conservation going I mean there's some you know in so far as the economic system forces it there's conservation but not rational planning for conservation you know it's just again profitability considerations impose Market considerations impose a certain degree of conservation but real long-term planning about sane use of energy that doesn't exist and in fact you know if we were really if they were even moderately serious about this we'd recognize that you know while conservation may be okay for the industrial countries it doesn't mean anything for the industrializing countries I mean they have to have resources of energy the kind that we have During the period of industrialization and we're going to let them have it you know that's one of the reasons why they probably can never get out of the Trap of underdevelopment so these are yeah I think you're quite right that's a very serious long-term problem but until there's rational planning for human use in the industrial countries it'll just be irrelevant will you happen to know if it's true that somebody found a way to turn water into hydrogen through other infusion reaction questions I've heard things like that but I assume they're untrue I I I'm not a big expert on it but I I think it's very unlikely that you get outright deception inside the scientific Community not because scientists are such wonderful people but because as I said before the world doesn't let you get away with it one of the fields in which you have to be honest is physics you can't get away with it otherwise so I tend to be suspicious about such things but [Music] yeah I was just wondering you have seem to have a lot of healthy skepticism and a very cynical attitude and it's not unfounded and that's and it goes back in history a long way with a lot of documentation I wanted to know what it is you counteract it with what do I counteract it with personally you mean or what do I counteract the step well things like this you know I mean I think what's encouraging is that there are lots and lots of people out there who really want to do something to change things and you know what could be more encouraging than that about change are there enough to bring about change well you know that's not the kind of thing you speculate about that's the kind of thing you try to do something about I don't know let's let's see you know let's try to make there be more people I mean look if you think about it over a longer period the change is very striking for example when the peace movement began in the 60s somebody mentioned before reminded me today that I was very pessimistic then in fact I was I used to spend my evenings going to talk uh in the homes of people who would bring together two or three neighbors because that's the biggest group you could get you know or we'd set up meetings in churches where we' bring together like six topics you know Vietnam Venezuela Iran you know etc etc hoping that out of that collection of topics we could get enough people so that the people there would outnumber the organizer aners you know that was going on as late as 1965 I should say and then blew up you know now the thing is totally different you know now everywhere you go there's lots and lots of people the level of sophistication and understanding is Way Beyond what it was in the 60s and also I think the level of commitment like look take the civil disobedience in last week on the pledge of resistance there were in Boston it's very hard to get information around the country because one of the lessons the Press learned in the late 60s was not to report demonstrations since that has a stimulative effect if you think you're alone you may not do things if you know everybody's doing it everywhere else you'll do it too so that's I was never reported anymore but uh in Boston but you know locally you can see what happened so it doesn't matter in Boston about I think probably 600 people or so were arrested in the sit in in the uh Federal Building over the Embargo and I think that that's the largest Civil Disobedience action in ever that I remember in Boston uh well you know that was over at embargo after all it wasn't over B52 bombing that's pretty impressive you know uh it's means that there's a tremendous difference between it was a you know in fact the thing never got to that point during the 60s and you know that means that there's been a big change so are there enough people well you know there a lot more than there were and I think there will be a lot more yet to come if people work on it hi um you mentioned you've talked a lot about um the spectrum of opinions that are dictated by the media and also um objectivity and and the the U fact that it doesn't really actually exist I wanted to talk just for a minute and have you address the issue of emotionalism which is a double-sided issue I thought you were going to go into it when you mentioned Vietnam and the the retrospectives that are going on right now you see a lot in the media right now about um honoring the Vietnam veterans and I certainly would want to give the impression that I was not honoring the Vietnam veterans I have family members that were killed in Vietnam and but at the same time I wanted to point out that that is something that's going on now and I've noticed an uprise of it in the last couple of years that um it's it's okay to be a hero now in fact it's really the good thing to do is to go out there and um kill people in other countries and on the other side of that coin of emotionalism is the fact that that it's very much frowned upon being emotional is very frowned on upon the objective papers the ones that go into the archives are the ones that are trusted by people who are moderate people um people who are related to me family members have told me that um Israel and Israelis are um unreasonable and irrational and that's why they are so militaristic they've also told me that people who come from Latin America are are too emotional and that's why they have so many problems down there and I feel like that that's something that's supported in our press too um how do you feel about that well uh first of all let me I mean I don't think there's obviously nothing wrong with being emotional you know you'd be you did if you you can't look at things that are happening and not react to them emotionally but of course you also have to U try to be rational it's there's no use giving the weapon of rationality to the enemy that's too strong a weapon you know so uh yes obviously well you know in fact uh uh Hume once said that reason should be the slave of the passions meaning you start with your emotional commitments but then you act rationally to try you know within those commitments that's sort of right I think uh as far as the you know various societies of the world are concerned I suppose the United States and maybe sectors of H Iran are the craziest societies that exist you so uh I mean for example it's very hard to find anything anywhere in the world world outside of maybe you know humanist fanaticism that corresponds to mainstream American intellectual life I I mean that quite seriously you know I mean a place where a president can get up and say that the destruction is mutual so we owe Vietnam no debt uh that the the educated community that can hear that is kind of off the wall you know not no point even talking to them anymore uh or a play or in fact you know you you or a place where the president can get up and say as he did last week that Nicaragua poses a military threat so severe that we have to have a National Security emergency and people don't break out in hysterical laughter uh that country is somewhere off to the lunatic side of Iran you know uh I don't know of anything like that stuff anywhere else in the world you know it's just totally crazy you know and so among American educated intellectuals I mean the concept of rationality is irrelevant because fanaticism is much too high you know jingoist lunacy is much too high and so on uh so and all this talk about moderates and you know the Latin Americans and you know I think almost any Latin American peasant understands more about the United States than almost any political science department okay so uh that's uh I'm I'm not joking I mean that seriously uh there was another point that you made which I forgot I was talking about the Vietnam retrospective oh yeah the Vietnam veterans well you know uh first of all I don't think that I mean should you honor people for doing what they're sort of forced to do I think you should pity them I don't see why I should honor them exactly uh uh the people you should honor are people who showed particular courage like resistors they should be H but you know but of course they're not going to be for obvious reasons uh because people in power don't want resistance what they want is obedience so they're going to honor obedience now doesn't mean that you should revile people who did what they were forced to do you should pity them you know you should support them recognize that they have a tough life and support and inly that's what happened mostly during the peace movement this stuff that's going on now about you know this uh this sort of kind of hysterical business about the uh you know like what's going on in Santa Barbara if you read that where they're having a big Revival session where uh they organize thousands of people and Veterans come up and they talk about how terribly they were treated by this or that year and so on most of that stuff is invented in my in my opinion or if it wasn't invented it may have happened I'm not saying people didn't have the experiences but it was outside the peace move peace move was very clear about this the peace move was always very and those of you who are say my age and so on will remember this the peace move was always very clear about the fact that the soldiers were victims and nobody was calling them baby killers when they came back at least nobody who was connected with the peace movement now you know there may have been all sorts of marginal peripheral things but most of this stuff is being being concocted and uh built up uh and as a kind of a manufactured hysteria for essentially Jingo was purposes well you know I don't think there's much I don't know really I mean I suspect that see I don't think see it's very hard to see in fact you take a look at the PE I don't believe about the soldiers guilt the guilt was not the soldiers in fact again let me say that well see it's very hard look if you're it's okay when you're sitting here you know to talk about what you should do in the field but if you're out you know trekking through the jungle and there's an 8-year-old kid there who may kill you it's hard not to kill him first you know now that was always understood uh and in fact again if you take a look at the peace movement literature you'll see that there was very little discussion of things like say Mei like for example I wrote an article on mili and I mentioned it about one line what I talked about is what's happening in Washington that's where the criminals are you know the guys who are out in the field there's nothing much they can do you know it's you it's very hard under you know conditions of combat to make discriminations I didn't mean psych even yeah well maybe maybe I I think there's a lot of manufactured hysteria going on in fact I was talking to a Swedish reporter u a week or two ago who was going around the country uh she was and she went to these Santa Barbara Sessions in particular which are the major ones she told me it reminded her of the Norberg rallies in the 1930s under Hitler you know and I think that's going on there's a lot of manufactured hysteria and the uh you know stab in the back business and so on and so forth and that's no joke you know uh I think one should be very cautious about U you know about I think one should understand this it's part of the way of building up more jingoist hisia well um Berkeley for example the question is about Berkeley going for Reagan Berkeley was always a very conservative town I was in I taught in Berkeley in ' 66 and ' 67 which was the peak of things and the a lot of young people were involved in the movement but you know not wealthy professionals Berkeley is now a yucky town you know it's wealthy professionals why shouldn't they vote for Reagan you know he's the guy who stuffs their pocket by stealing from the people down in the flats you know so you know but on the other hand uh my daughter's a student at Berkeley in fact nothing's getting reported but she's been sleeping out on the steps of sprout hole lately on the an aparte demonstrations and I just told me the other day that about 7,000 students were involved in a meeting there that's quite a lot i' I've given talks in Berkeley in the last couple years there's always a lot of people interested I mean you know that Berkeley did change and I think it it's kind of it's it's not an accidental change I mean I think it was manipul partly manipulated change there's been an off young people have been subjected to a tremendous propaganda campaign in the 70s and it's had some effect I mean the the the uh what was considered most frightening in the 60s was the fact that young people acted on honest impulses and that's scary so one thing that was done in the 70s was to concoct this narcissism story you know one of the big PR jobs in the 1970s was to try to convince everybody that you're narcissistic you know you don't care about anybody else uh of course everybody every individual knew it wasn't true of that person but you know each person know it's not true of myself you know but what you're told is the whole culture is narcissistic you're only supposed to be interested in yourself and so on and so forth therefore everyone feels well I must be weird you know so I better play that game too and the net effect is uh you know that the that it does become a cultural pattern but I don't think it's really deep-seated in any sense uh next time do you see U Mass demonstrations or Civil Disobedience having effect aside from teaching the government to do things more deviously and more secretly well after all that's a big effect see as far as the pure uh the administration is much tougher and meaner and that's not because you know it's because the objective situation has changed Central America is a much more see Vietnam was kind of a peripheral interest the United States could give up trying to conquer Vietnam and nothing much would change in the global scene Central America is U the major area designated for American robbery and has been for a long time it's not just a matter of robbing their resources I think the United States is planning to uh