NOAM CHOMSKY: The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies”
23. Jun, 2011
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Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is one of the major intellectuals of our time. The eighty-two-year-old American linguist, philosopher and activist is a severe critic of US foreign and economic policy. Ceyda Nurtsch talked to him about the Arabic spring in its global context
Q: Mr. Chomsky, many people claim that the Arab world is incompatible with democracy. Would you say that the recent developments falsify this thesis?
Noam Chomsky: The thesis never had any basis whatsoever. The Arab-Islamic world has a long history of democracy. It’s regularly crushed by western force. In 1953 Iran had a parliamentary system, the US and Britain overthrew it. There was a revolution in Iraq in 1958, we don’t know where it would have gone, but it could have been democratic. The US basically organized a coup.
False friends: Iran’ democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh during a visit in the US in 1951, two years before the CIA’s coup d’état that ousted him
In internal discussions in 1958, which have since been declassified, President Eisenhower spoke about a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. Not from the governments, but from the people. The National Security Council’s top planning body produced a memorandum – you can pick it up on the web now – in which they explained it. They said that the perception in the Arab world is that the United States blocks democracy and development and supports harsh dictators and we do it to get control over their oil. The memorandum said, this perception is more or less accurate and that’s basically what we ought to be doing.
Q: That means that western democracies prevented the emergence of democracies in the Arab world?
Chomsky: I won’t run through the details, but yes, it continues that way to the present. There are constant democratic uprisings. They are crushed by the dictators we – mainly the US, Britain, and France – support. So sure, there is no democracy because you crush it all. You could have said the same about Latin America: a long series of dictators, brutal murderers. As long as the US controls the hemisphere, or Europe before it, there is no democracy, because it gets crushed.
Q: So you were not surprised at all by the Arab Spring?
Chomsky: Well, I didn’t really expect it. But there is a long background to it. Let’s take Egypt for instance. You’ll notice that the young people who organized the demonstrations on January 25th called themselves the April 6th movement. There is a reason for that. April 6th 2008 was supposed to be a major labour action in Egypt at the Mahalla textile complex, the big industrial centre: strikes, support demonstrations around the country and so on. It was all crushed by the dictatorship. Well, in the West we don’t pay any attention: as long as dictatorships control people, what do we care!
Egyptian riot police beat a protester with batons, during anti government protests in the city of Mahalla, Egypt (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser).
“Efforts to create democracy”: On 6 April 2008 Egyptian workers, primarily in the state-run textile industry, striked in response to low wages and rising food costs. Strikes were illegal in Egypt, and the protests were eventually crushed
But in Egypt they remember, and that’s only one in a long series of militant strike actions. Some of them succeeded. There are some good studies of this. There is one American scholar, Joel Beinen – he is at Stanford – he has done a lot of work on the Egyptian labour movement. And he has recent articles and earlier ones, in which he discusses labour struggles going on for a long time: those are efforts to create democracy.
Q: Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, claimed to cause a domino effect of freedom with his policy of the “New Middle East”. Is there a relation between the uprisings in the Arab world to the policy of George W. Bush?
Chomsky: The main theme of modern post-war history is the domino effect: Cuba, Brazil, Vietnam… Henry Kissinger compared it to a virus that might spread contagion. When he and Nixon were planning the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende in Chile – we have all the internal materials now – Kissinger in particular said, the Chilean virus might affect countries as far as Europe. Actually, he and Brezhnev agreed on that, they were both afraid of democracy and Kissinger said, we have to wipe out this virus. And they did, they crushed it.
Today it’s similar. Both Bush and Obama are terrified of the Arab spring. And there is a very sensible reason for that. They don’t want democracies in the Arab world. If Arab public opinion had any influence on policy, the US and Britain had been tossed out of the Middle East. That’s why they are terrified of democracies in the region.
Q: The well-known British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk recently stated that Obama and his policy is irrelevant for the developments in the region…
Chomsky: I read the article, it’s very good. Robert Fisk is a terrific journalist and he really knows the region well. I think what he means is that the activists in the April 6th movement don’t care about the United States. They have totally given up on the US. They know the United States is their enemy. In fact in public opinion in Egypt about 90 per cent think that the US is the worst threat that they face. In that sense the USA is of course not irrelevant. It’s just too powerful.
Q: Some criticize the Arab intellectuals for being too silent, too passive. What should the role of the Arab intellectual be today?
Chomsky: Intellectuals have a special responsibility. We call them intellectuals because they are privileged and not because they are smarter than anyone else. But if you are privileged and you have some status and you can be articulate and so on we call you an intellectual. And it’s the same in the Arab world as anywhere else.
Source: Noam Chomsky
Ceyda Nurtsch
© Qantara.de 2011
Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de
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Intellectuals are privileged because the zionist media declares it so. Ala mr. Chomsky. If he wasn’t a Jew, he’d probably be working McDonalds.
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Alex Reply:
June 25th, 2011 at 9:26 am
Wrong! Chomsky is a pain in the ass to the US government which is ruled by Zionists. But yes, he is tolerated by Zionists as a weak opposition because he gives impression of democracy at work.
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Dr Hatem A Tawfik Reply:
July 1st, 2011 at 3:47 am
Jew or not it doesn’t matter, he is an honest guy. Honesty has nothing to do with religion or faith in general. it is a universal human trait.
Hatem A Tawfik, MD
Cairo, Egypt
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By “the west” Chomsky is undoubtedly referring the the US/British military/economic coalition of promoted and protected interests. These persons and their indoctrinated lapdogs, whether voting citizens/subjects or bureaucratic sycophants, fear any democracy anywhere, whether that democracy reveals an Islamic bias or not. The very notion of an “Islamic democracy” is every bit as oxymoronic as the term “Christian democracy.”
In linguistics, Chomsky reveals an English language/Yiddish bias that negates the validity of much of what he concludes. There is little, if any, real data to support his generative theory and his assumptions fly in the face of much conscientious research performed by more competent investigators.
Since Chomsky is an elitist, the core of his conclusions are tainted by a dual standard, yet he is tolerated by the powers that be simply due to the fact that although he attacks their core values, he is more than a little bit ambiguous and a card carrying member of the elitist core of an insular society of privileged elitists.
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Well, simple answear they don’t want the gold Region to become powerfull it’s like bad for business , let’s face it arab countires are huge power source, they have alot of sources more than the west , and if arab did reforms in education and used it To their interests,USA and the west they will be very tiny compare to what arab will become
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Mr. Chomsky, has been always a very fair and objective in his evaluation of what is going in the Middle East. All his writing shows that he is anti Zionist anti Imperialist. It is a breath of fresh air to find somebody in his intellectual capacity in the West where Zionism has established monopoly over their foreign policies and their thinking.
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You are all wrong. Mr. Chomsky has absolutely NO understanding of religion. His focus on politics is skewed because he refuses to see the enmeshed relationships between politics, religion and economics.
You are correct in declaring that Chomsky is a non-Zionistic Jew. His conclusion that US politics is tied up with Zionist Jews in Israel(and the US) is correct. Whether a Zionist or not, Chomsky is still an urban Jew with all of the biases and baggage of an urban American Jew. This condition of ethnic particularism skews his perceptions of reality in a predictable direction. While some of his conclusions may be generally correct, he is neither deep nor broad in his assessments of pertinent social/cultural phenomena.
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Dear papsotherboy
I think, it is a shame that you have tarnished a great and visionary intellectual who has spent all his life in researching, analysing and saying what we all wish to articulate. His being Jewish or urban has no relevance in this discussion. Saying that; Noam Chomsky is neither deep nor broad in his assessments of pertinent social/cultural phenomena, goes to show how little you have rewad him or even made an effort to understand him.
Kind regards
Bashy
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