Look, every government has a need to frighten its population, and one way of doing that is to shroud its working in mystery. The idea that a government has to be shrouded in mystery is something that goes back to Herodotus [ancient Greek historian]. You read Herodotus, and he describes how the Medes and others won their freedom by struggle, and then they lost their freedom when the institution of royalty was invented to create a cloak of mystery around power. See, the idea behind royalty was that there’s this other species of individuals who are beyond the norm and who the people are not supposed to understand. That’s the standard way you cloak and protect power: you make it look mysterious and secret, above the ordinary person - otherwise, why should anybody accept it? Well, they’re willing to accept it out of fear that some great enemies are about to destroy them, and because of that they’ll cede their authority to the Lord, or the King, or the President or something, just to protect themselves. That’s the way governments work - that’s the way any system of power works - and the secrecy system is part of it.
See, they’re not really trying to sell newspapers to people - in fact, very often a journal that’s in financial trouble will try to cut down its circulation, and that they’ll try to do is up-scale their readership, because that increases advertising rates. So what they’re doing is selling audiences to other businesses, and for the agenda-setting media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they’re in fact selling very privileged, elite audiences to other businesses - overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called “political class,” which is the class that makes decisions in our society.
Okay, imagine that you’re an intelligent Martian looking down at this system. What you see is big corporations selling relatively privileged audiences in the decision-making classes to other businesses. Now you ask, what picture of the world do you expect to come out of this arrangement? Well, a plausible answer is, one that puts forward points of view and political perspectives which satisfy the needs and the interests and the perspectives of the buyers, the sellers, and the market. I mean, it would be pretty surprising if that weren’t the case.
No, the primary concern is to prevent independence, regardless of the ideology. Remember, we’re the global power, so we have to make sure that all the various parts of the world continue serving their assigned functions in our global system. And the assigned functions of the Third World countries are to be markets for American business, sources of resources for American business, to provide cheap labor for American business, and so on.
It takes only a moment’s thought to realize that the areas that have been the most under US control are some of the most horrible regions in the world. For instance, why is Central America such a horror-chamber?
I mean, these Asian countries aren’t pretty; I can’t stand them myself - they’re extremely authoritarian, there are plenty of unpleasant things about them. But they have been able to pursue economic development measures that are successful: the state coordinates industrial policy, capital export is strictly constrained, import levels are kept low. Well, those are exactly the kinds of policies that are impossible in Latin America, because the US insists that those governments keep their economies open to international markets - so capital from Latin America is constantly flowing to the West.
If you take a look at imperial systems over history, it’s not at all clear that they are profitable enterprises in the final analysis. This has been studied in the case of the British Empire, and while you only get kind of qualitative answers, it looks as if the British Empire may have cost as much to maintain as the profits that came from it. And probably something like that is true for the US-dominated system too. So take Central America: there are profits from our controlling Central America, but it’s very doubtful that they come anywhere near the probably ten billion dollars a year in tax money that’s required to maintain US domination there.
If you ask, “Why have an empire?” you’ve just given the answer. The empire is like every other part of social policy: it’s a way for the poor to pay off the rich in their own society.
Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population. If politics begins to break out inside your own country and the population starts getting active, all kinds of horrible things can happen - so you have to keep the population quiescent and obedient and passive. And international conflict is one of the best ways of doing it: if there’s a big enemy around, people will abandon their rights, because you’ve got to survive. So the arms race is functional in that respect - it creates global tension and a mood of fear.
The arms race also plays a crucial role in keeping the economy going - and that’s a big problem. Suppose that the arms race really did decline: how would you force the taxpayers to keep subsidizing high-technology industry like they’ve been doing for the past fifty years? Is some politician going to get up and say, “Alright, next year you’re going to lower your standard of living, because you have to subsidize IBM so that it can produce fifth-generation computers”?
If the government spends n dollars to stimulate the economy, it doesn’t really matter what it’s spent on: they can build jet planes, they can bury it in the sand and get people to dig for it, they can build roads and houses, they can do all sorts of things - in terms of stimulating the economy, the economic effects are not all that different. But the problem is, spending for civilian purposes has negative side effects. For one thing, it interferes with managerial prerogatives. The money that’s funneled through the Pentagon system is just a straight gift to the corporate manager, it’s like saying, “I’ll buy anything you produce, and I’ll pay for the R&D and if you can make any profits, fine.” From the point of view of the corporate manager, that’s optimal. But if the government started producing anything that business might be able to sell directly to the commercial market, then it would be interfering with corporate profit-making.
The other point, which is even more serious from the perspective of private power, is that social spending increases the danger of democracy - it threatens to increase popular involvement in decision-making. For example, if the government gets involved in building hospitals and schools and roads, people are going to get interested in it, and they’ll want to have a say in it - because it affects them, and is related to their lives. On the other hand, if the government says, “We’re going to build a Stealth Bomber,” nobody has any opinions. People care about where there’s going to be a school or hospital, but they don’t care about what kind of jet plane you build - because they don’t have the foggiest idea about that.
It’s been known since the Great Depression that anything like free-market capitalism is a total disaster: it can’t work. That’s why every industrial economy has a massive state sector - and the way our massive state sector works in the US is mainly through the military system.
Star Wars is basically a technique for subsidizing high-technology industry. Nobody believes that it’s a defense system. It’s simply a way to subsidize the development of the next generation of high technology - fancy software, complicated computer systems, fifth-generation computers, lasers, and so on.
In fact, just take a look at the parts of the American economy that are competitive internationally: it’s agriculture, which gets massive state subsidies; the cutting edge of high-tech industry, which is paid for by the Pentagon; and the pharmaceutical industry, which is heavily subsidized through public science funding - those are the parts of the economy that function competitively. And the same thing is true of every other country in the world: the successful economies are the ones that have a big government sector. I mean, capitalism is fine for the Third World - we love them to be inefficient. But we’re not going to accept it. And what’s more, this has been true since the beginnings of the industrial revolution: there is not a single economy in history that developed without extensive state intervention, like high protectionist tariffs and subsidies and so on. In fact, all the things we prevent the Third World from doing have been the prerequisites for development everywhere else - I think that’s without exception. So to return to your question, there is just no way to cut taxes very much without the entire economy collapsing.
There’s hardly any element of advanced-technology industry in the US that’s not tied to into the Pentagon system - which includes NASA, the Department of Energy [which produces nuclear weapons], that whole apparatus. In fact, that’s basically what the Pentagon is for, and that’s also why its budget always stays pretty much the same.
Actually if you look back at the debates which went on in the late 1940s when the Pentagon system was first being set up, they’re very revealing. You have to examine the whole development against the background of what had just happened. There was this huge Depression in the 1930s, worldwide, and at that point everyone understood that capitalism was dead. I mean, whatever lingering beliefs people had had about it, and they weren’t very much before, they were gone at that point - because the whole capitalist system had just gone into a tailspin: there was no way to save it the way it was going. They did it independently, but they more or less hit on the same method - namely, state spending, public spending of some kind, what’s called “Keynesian stimulation.” And that did finally get countries out of the Depression. In the Fascist countries, it worked very well - they got out pretty fast. And in fact, every country became sort of fascist; again, “fascism” doesn’t mean gas chambers, it means a special form of economic arrangement with state coordination of unions and corporations and a big role for business.
Well in the US, the form that fascism took at first was the New Deal. But the New Deal was too small, it didn’t really have much effect - 1939, the Depression was still approximately what it had been in 1932. Then came the WW2, and at that point we became really fascist: we had a totalitarian society basically, with a command economy, wage and price controls, allocations of materials, all done straight from Washington. And the people who were running it were mostly corporate executives, who were called into the capital to direct the economy during the war effort. And they got the point: this worked. So the US economy prospered during the war, industrial production almost quadrupled, and we were finally out of the Depression.
Alright, then the war ended: now what happens? Well, everybody expected that we were going to go right back into the Depression - because nothing fundamental had changed, the only thing that had changed was that we’d had this big period of government stimulation of the economy during the war. So the question was, what happens now?
So at that point, there was general agreement among business and elite planners in the US that there would have to be massive government funneling of public funds into the economy, the only question was how to do it. Should the government pursue military spending or social spending? Well, it was quickly made very clear in those discussions that the route that government spending was going to have to take was military: military spending doesn’t redistribute wealth, it’s not democratizing. It’s just a straight gift to the corporate manager, period.
And the public is not supposed to know about it. So as the first Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, put the matter very plainly back in 1948, he said: “The word to use is not ‘subsidy,’ but ‘security.’”
The US has a major stake in the arms race: it’s needed for domestic control, for controlling the empire, for keeping the economy running. And it’s going to be very hard to get around that; I actually think that’s one of the toughest things for a popular movement to change, because changing the commitment to the Pentagon system will affect the whole economy and the way it’s run. It’s a lot harder than, say, getting out of Vietnam. That was a peripheral issue for the system of power. This is a central issue.
This system was designed, with a lot of conscious and intelligent thought, for the particular purpose that it serves.
There have to be large-scale institutional changes, we need a real democratization of the society. I mean, if we continue to have domination of the economic and political system by corporations, why should they behave any differently? It’s not that the people in the corporations are bad people, it’s that the institutional necessity of the system is to maintain corporate domination and profit-making. I mean, if the Chairman of General Motors suddenly decided to start producing the best quality cars at the cheapest prices, he wouldn’t be Chairman any longer - there’d be a shift on the stock market and they’d throw him out in five minutes. And that generalizes to the system as a whole. There is absolutely no reason why the people who own the economy would want it to be set up in a way that undermines or weakens their control, any more than there’s a reason why they would want there to be a political system in which the population genuinely participate - why would they? They’d be crazy. Just like they’d be crazy if they opened up the media to dissident opinion - what possible purpose would there be in that? Or if they let the universities teach honest history, let’s say. It would be absurd.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do. Even within the current structure of power, there’s plenty of latitude for pressure and changes and reforms. I mean, any institution is going to have to respond to public pressure - because their interest is to keep the population more or less passive and quiescent, and if the population is not passive and quiescent, then they have to respond to that. But really dealing with the problems at their core ultimately will require getting to the source of power and dissolving it - otherwise you may be able to fix things up around the edges, but you won’t really change anything fundamentally. So the alternative just has to be putting control over these decisions into popular hands - there simply is no other way besides dissolving and diffusing power democratically, I think.
You’ll notice somehow it’s always the US Navy or the US Air force that Libya is shooting at - they never shoot at Italian planes, or French planes, or Spanish planes, it’s always American planes. Well, what’s the reason? One possibility is the Libyans are insane: they go after the people who are going to wipe them out. The other possibility is that the Americans are trying to get shot at. The reason the Libyans only shoot at American planes is because American planes are sent over there to get shot at; nobody else sends planes into the Gulf of Sidra, because there’s no point in doing it, so therefore they don’t get shot at.
The beginning phase of the 1986 confrontation occurred when the American planes penetrated Libyan territorial air space and finally got shot at - happily, because they know they’re never actually going to be hit by the Libyan air defenses. They then flew back to the fleet, and the American Navy bombed a bunch of Libyan navy vessels and killed lots of Libyans.
Do you think the passage of time can give legitimacy to Israel?
Well, yeah - the general answer to your question just has to be yes. If not, we’d have to go back to the days of hunter-gatherer societies, because all of history has been illegitimate.
I mean, take a case close to the Palestinians, which we as Americans ought to think about - take the US. Now, I think the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel has been bad, but in comparison to the treatment of the native population here by our forefathers, it’s been a paradise.
Here in the US, we just committed genocide. Period. Pure genocide. And it wasn’t just in the US, it was all up and own the Hemisphere.
So I think other forms of social organization have to be developed - and those forms are not too difficult to imagine. I mean, the UN was an attempt to do something about it, but it didn’t work, because the superpowers won’t let it work. International law is the same story. International law is a method by which you might regulate the aggressive and destructive tendencies of the nation-state - the trouble is, international law doesn’t have a police force: there are no Martians around to enforce it. So international law will only work if the powers subjected to it are willing to accept it, and the US is not willing to accept it. If the World Court condemns us, we simply disregard it, it’s not our problem - we’re above the law, we’re a lawless state. And as long as the major powers in the world are lawless and violent, and are unwilling to enter into international arrangements or other kinds of mechanisms which would constrain force and violence, there’s very little hope for human survival, I would think.
Take the US: the US was not founded on the principle that “the people” ought to rule - that’s freshman Civics, it’s not what happened in history. If you look back at the actual record, you’ll find that the principles of the American Founding Fathers were quite different.
Keep in mind, all of the Founding Fathers hated democracy - Thomas Jefferson was a partial exception, but only partial. For the most part, they hated democracy. The principles of the Founding Fathers were rather nicely expressed by John Jay, the head of the Constitutional Convention and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His favorite maxim was, “The people who own the country ought to govern it” - that’s the principle on which the US was founded. The major framer of the Constitution, James Madison, emphasized very clearly in the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the whole system must be designed, as he put it, “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority” - that’s the primary purpose of the government, he said.
It’s not a very big secret who owns the country: you look at the Fortune 500 every year and you figure out pretty well who owns the country. The country is basically owned by a network of conglomerates that control production and investment and banking and so on, and are tightly inter-linked and very highly concentrated - they own the country. And the principle of American democracy is that they also ought to govern it. And to a very large extent, they do. Now, whenever you have a concentration of power like that, you can be certain that the people who have the power are going to maximize it - and they’re going to maximize it at the expense of others, both in their own country and abroad.
The climate is going to change, so the agricultural-producing areas of the US could become dust-bowls. And when these changes start to be recognized, they’re going to set into motion social conflict of a sort that we can’t even imagine - I mean, if it turns out that agricultural areas in the US are becoming unviable and that Siberia is becoming the next great agricultural producer, do you think that American planners are going to allow the Russians to use it? We’ll conquer it, even if we have to destroy the world in a nuclear war to do it.