Linguist, philosopher, and critic Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Imperial Ambitions, with David Barsamian, and Failed States. Barsamian is the founder of Alternative Radio (www.alternativeradio.org), which this year celebrates its twentieth anniversary. His interview books include The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, with Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire, with Eqbal Ahmad, and Original Zinn, with Howard Zinn. This interview, conducted on December 12, 2006, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is an excerpt of a longer interview in David Barsamian’s forthcoming book of conversations with Noam Chomsky, What We Say Goes (Metropolitan Books).

NICARAGUA RECENTLY had an election in which the former Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, has become president. What’s your take on Ortega?

ENVÍO IS a magazine published at the Jesuit University in Managua. It’s perhaps the best magazine on Central America, very well done. The last issue was on this. They pointed out some interesting things. They said in the preceding elections—I think it was 1996 and 2001, when it seemed that Ortega might have a chance—there was a lot of capital flight and threats and concerns. This time, none. It was all taken very calmly. To tell you the honest truth, I never thought much of him in the first place. He completely discredited himself in the 1990s with the pact he made with [former Nicaraguan president Arnoldo] Alemán, who is an ultra-corrupt gangster. The two of them together, with Ortega’s control over the FSLN, the Sandinista party, and Alemán’s party, the Liberal Constitutional Party, could protect Alemán from real punishment and also prevent any real constructive moves being made—not that it was very likely—in the legislature of the government. Ortega appears to have become just another right-wing character. He’s an opportunist. He always was an opportunist. He still has a loyal following among people who have a commitment to the old Sandinista hopes and days, but it’s an illusion.

Nicaragua is a sad place. It’s now the second poorest country in the hemisphere. A very large part of the workforce is abroad, mostly in Costa Rica, some in the United States and elsewhere. There is no development going on. There is a lot of wealth. If you drive around Managua, you see it’s very glitzy—24-hour supermarkets and things like that. Anything you want to buy, you can buy. But also kids scratching at the windshields asking for a cordoba to get through the night. Like India. Pretty awful. It’s declined enormously since the United States took it over again in 1990. And Ortega is going with the flow. He and his friends enriched themselves and they’ll pal around with Alemán and the rest of them. I don’t think U.S. investors have anything to worry about, and they don’t seem to be worried—or the corporate elite, the elite in Nicaragua, which is super rich, as in most Third World countries. Nicaragua is also the country in Central America that most religiously followed IMF [International Monetary Fund] rules. So they privatized energy. The other countries didn’t. And Nicaragua, predictably, has a terrible energy shortage, much worse than the other countries. Guatemala is bad enough, but Nicaragua is worse. Costa Rica, the one functioning country, and, incidentally, the one country in the region the United States never invaded, has, I think by now moved close to 100 percent sustainable energy, like hydro-electric power, and things like that. Nicaragua is the worst.

The foreign-owned company that runs the energy system has plenty of reserve power, but it doesn’t use it because it’s just not profitable enough. That’s the way it works. If you privatize water, you can construct economic models that show you that it’s very efficient. And you should get the prices right, and that’s efficient. There is a footnote that isn’t mentioned. Namely, when you get the prices right, a lot of the population can’t pay them, so they don’t have water. Nothing’s perfect.

There have been major struggles about that in Bolivia, particularly in Cochabamba, where there was a big uprising and they forced Bechtel out. That was a good example of real globalization. Part of the reason they could succeed was that they were able to quickly contact activists everywhere, so there were demonstrations at Bechtel offices. It happened to coincide with a big demonstration in Washington against the World Bank and IMF policies. They contacted them, so they were able to launch a big protest right in Washington at the same time as the Cochabamba protests. That gave them international publicity. That’s real globalization by people, so therefore it’s called anti-globalization. But it worked.

GLOBALIZATION FROM below.

ACTUALLY, COCHABAMBA just last weekend had a very important meeting, so important that it wasn’t reported in the United States, as far as I know. The presidents of the countries of South America met and apparently had a pretty constructive meeting. Hostilities were muted. There had been hostility between Chávez and García in Peru. They were screaming at each other. But they apparently kind of settled it. There were programs discussed for further integration of the region, which is a very significant development. This is actually the first time since the Spanish conquest that there have been moves toward integration and independence. The United States is very worried about it, and I presume that’s the reason it wasn’t reported. But it was a major meeting.

ONE OF the major figures of the Reagan administration during the Contra terror war against the Sandinistas was UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick. She was praised by Condoleezza Rice as one of our best ambassadors, with a very strong voice. It was Kirkpatrick who made the unusual distinction between authoritarian regimes, which the United States could support, as opposed to totalitarian regimes, which the United States could not get behind.

THE REASON she gave was that totalitarian regimes could never change, so they were firmly embedded forever. Russia was her main example. A couple of years later it radically changed. A wonderful prediction. That article in Commentary was bad enough, but worse was she had some unbelievable passages about how, yes, sure, there is plenty of suffering and misery and torture in the countries that we support, but people are used to that, they kind of expect it, so they don’t really mind it that much. She put it in a way which was much worse than that, but that was the core content of it.

There is another character in the news who was involved in Nicaragua. That’s Robert Gates. I think it was 1984 when he secretly advised that the United States bomb Nicaragua because it’s such a threat to us, a growing military threat. Any day now they’ll be at our throats. He’s now the secretary of defense. So we’re safe. We’ll be defended from any country like Nicaragua.

RAFAEL CORREA was recently elected president of Ecuador. He was educated in economics in the United States but he doesn’t have a traditional view of the United States or of economics.

I READ some of his speeches. He’s on the Left. He’s opposed to what are called the free-trade agreements, which have almost nothing to do with free trade —the agreements that are designed to impose investor/lender rule over the countries. He’s opposed to them.

He had some interesting comments. There is a big U.S. military base in Ecuador. He was asked during the campaign if he would close it down, and he said, well, he would allow the United States to leave it open if they would allow an Ecuadoran base to be established in Miami. That’s a good answer, a reasonable answer. So he might close it down, unless the pressure is too high. Which would be severe for the United States. It’s one of the few, maybe the last big remaining military base that the United States has in South America. They have places where they’re pretty well established. In fact, there are probably more U.S. military personnel there now than at the height of the Cold War.

It’s an indication of how it’s getting harder to use the traditional means to control South America. The traditional means were violence and economic strangulation. Violence just isn’t working anymore. The last coup attempt was in 2002 [against Chavéz in Venezuela–ed.]. It didn’t work. The governments that the United States is now supporting are governments that it probably would have been overthrowing by military coups thirty, forty years ago. Take Brazil, Lula’s government. The current party line is that in South America there are the bad guys and the good guys. They’re all sort of center-left or something. But the bad guys are Chávez, Morales. They’re seeing where Corrêa goes. The official good guys are Lula and García. So it’s therefore necessary to suppress the fact that the first action that Lula took after his reelection in October was to go to Venezuela to offer his support for Chávez in the electoral campaign and to inaugurate a joint project, I think a bridge over the Orinoco River and other new development projects. That doesn’t fit the party line, so, to my knowledge, that was not even reported, because he’s supposed to be a good guy. If you look at his policies, they’re probably more progressive than João Goulart’s forty years ago. At that time, the Kennedy administration organized a coup, which took place right after the assassination to institute the first of the neo-Nazi-style national security states; Chile was another, later. That shows how much things have changed.

2006 MARKED a huge surge in immigrant rallies and demonstrations across the country in large numbers. People had no idea that there were these communities here. I’m not just talking about Los Angeles and New York, but towns in Arkansas and South Carolina. What did you make of that?

THAT WAS quite interesting. Integration has always been a big problem. It’s nothing new. If you look back through American history, of course, everybody is an immigrant except the remnants of the indigenous population. But as each wave of immigrants came along, they tried to set up barriers against the next wave, and the new immigrants were treated miserably. Take, say, the Irish in Boston. You would see signs, “No dogs and Irish allowed.” I think the life expectancy for Irish males was something like fifteen years. They were treated really viciously. The same is true of every wave. Or take the Chinese. They were allowed in to build the railroads, but then there was a Chinese Exclusion Act, which just blocked them altogether, up until 1922, actually—part of the background for the Second World War in the Pacific. So it goes.

In fact, in a way the most grotesque case is my background—Jews. In the 1930s, Jews were trying to escape Europe. Many could see what was happening. Almost all of them wanted to come to the United States. Very few wanted to go to Palestine. There were heavy barriers established. There was the famous incident of the St. Louis, the ship that made it almost to the United States—Cuba —and Roosevelt sent it back to Europe, full of refugees, who ended up in the concentration camps.

And it went on after the war. After the Second World War, there were still people dying in displaced persons camps. They didn’t have the extermination camps going, but the conditions were very similar. Chances are, if they had had a chance, they would have wanted to come to the United States. Half of Europe would have wanted to, certainly the people who had survived the Holocaust. Very few of them made it, because of anti-immigrant feeling and anti-Semitism, and very little effort on the part of the Jewish community to pressure for immigration, with one exception, the anti-Zionist groups. The American Council for Judaism, which was anti-Zionist, I think did lobby for the Stratton immigration bill but didn’t get anywhere. Most wanted them to be sent off to Palestine, where they were going to be basically cannon fodder.

There is a very interesting book that just came out about that by an Israeli neuroscientist who did an analysis of the archives, the Yiddish archives, the YIVO archives, which were sent over to Israel. He’s the first person to have investigated them. The Hebrew title of his book is Good Human Material. That’s the way it translates. It was reviewed extensively in Israel. I’ve never seen a mention of it here. It’s quite a story about how the camps were essentially taken over by Zionist activists from Palestine, who ran them and controlled food supplies and so on. The basic idea was that every man and woman of seventeen to thirty-five, that age group, able-bodied men and women, would be compelled somehow to go to Palestine, later Israel. The American Jewish community was pretty passive. I can remember that. They didn’t want them here either. But the anti-immigrant feeling was so strong that it contributed to the Holocaust and contributed to the deaths after the war was over, when there was no more excuse about not bombing Auschwitz and so on. That’s a pretty dramatic case of anti-immigrant feeling.

What we’re seeing now is bad enough, but it’s nothing novel in history.

IS THAT book available in English?

YES. IT’S called In the Shadow of the Holocaust by Yosef Grodzinsky. It was published by Common Courage. I haven’t seen a word about it anywhere. It’s a very interesting book. As I say, when the original edition came out in Hebrew, it was quite widely discussed, and pretty favorably.

GOING BACK to Central America and Latin America in general, the current Pope, Benedict, who has managed to mire himself in controversy around his less-than-flattering statements about Islam, was known, apparently, as the enforcer during the reign of the much revered and hallowed Pope John Paul II to eliminate liberation theology, which began, I believe, in Brazil and then spread across the continent. He was the guy who purged, apparently, high-ranking Catholic officials.

WE DON’T know the inner workings of the Vatican, but that’s what was reported. And it certainly looks like that from his writings. It’s interesting that one of the talking points of the School of the Americas is that the U.S. Army helped defeat liberation theology. But the Vatican played its role, ugly role, of the kind that you mentioned.

It’s rather striking in the light of the history of the church. The crime of liberation theology was that it took the Gospels seriously. That’s unacceptable. The Gospels are radical pacifist material, if you take a look at them. When the Roman Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity, he shifted it from a radical pacifist religion to the religion of the Roman Empire. So the cross, which was the symbol of the suffering of the poor, was put on the shield of the Roman soldiers. Since that time, the church has been pretty much the church of the rich and the powerful, just the opposite of the message of the Gospels. And liberation theology, from Pope John XXIII and his influence and the bishops in Latin America, in Brazil particularly, picked up the actual Gospels and brought it to peasants. They said, let’s actually read what the Gospels say and let’s try to act on the principles they describe. That is a major crime. That set off the Reagan wars of terror, the Vatican repression, and so on. The United States was virtually at war with the Catholic Church in the 1980s in its own way, and the Vatican in their way. It was a clash of civilizations, if you like—the U.S. versus the Gospels—including those who posture about how Jesus is their favorite philosopher.

IN FAILED States, you point out that critics of the system are often denounced for being negative and never having anything positive to put forth. You address that criticism with some specific suggestions about solutions.

VERY UNORIGINAL suggestions. Those suggestions just happen to be supported by a large majority of people in the United States. I think they’re good suggestions. They would change the country significantly. There is nothing radical about them, but they’re off the agenda. That’s part of the serious collapse of democratic institutions. There is a lot of talk right now about how it’s a divided country, we have to bring it together, red and blue. It is in fact a divided country, but not the way that’s being discussed. It’s divided between the public and the power systems, the government and the corporate system. Yes, a big gap between them. So these examples here are chosen from public-opinion studies and are supported by, in most cases, very large majorities of the population. I think they’re all quite sound proposals. They can’t be discussed because of the same gap.

We were talking about Bolivia before. It’s rather striking to compare Bolivia with the United States. There is a lot of talk now in the left liberal press about how we have to do something about our electoral processes because people don’t trust the voting machines and some people don’t have a chance to vote, and they don’t count, there is fraud. That may all be correct, but it’s kind of a footnote. The real problem is we don’t have elections. You don’t have elections when the issues that the population is concerned about do not arise on the electoral agenda.

In Bolivia, in contrast, they actually had a free election, a serious one, last year. Huge participation. Everybody knew the issues. The issues were important. They didn’t just come on voting day. They had been struggling about those issues for years. Like in Cochabamba, the protests there, I think a couple dozen people were killed. There were mass popular organizations. They elected someone from their own ranks. That’s an election. It’s so remote from conceivability in the West, certainly the United States, that it’s incredible.

This is one illustration of the enormous gap between public opinion and public policy on a host of issues, quite a lot of issues. We see it every day. When I was driving home the other day and listening to NPR—my masochist streak—they happened to have a long segment on Barack Obama. Very favorable, really enthusiastic, this new star coming on the political firmament. I was listening to see if they were going to say anything about his position on any issue—any issue. Nothing. It was just about the image. I think they may have had a couple words about how he’s in favor of doing something about the climate. What are his positions? It just doesn’t matter. You read the articles. It’s the same. He gives hope. He has an image of I don’t know what. He looks right into your eyes when you talk to him. That’s what’s considered significant. Not, shall we control our own resources, shall we nationalize our resources, shall we have water for people, shall we have health systems, shall we stop carrying out aggression. No. That’s not mentioned. Because our electoral system, our political system, has been driven to such a low level that issues are completely marginalized.

The mechanisms are understood. Elections are run by the same people who sell toothpaste. They market candidates the same way. You’re not supposed to know the information about toothpaste. You’re not supposed to know the information about candidates. Take the congressional elections in November. They’re interpreted as kind of a referendum on Iraq. The population wants to get out. Maybe they were, but do you know the positions of the Democratic candidates who were elected on Iraq? Maybe two or three of them. For the most part, you don’t know what their positions were. We don’t like it. That’s a position.

IT’S NOT going well.

IT’S NOT going well. We’re not doing too well. But was the voice of the population heard? No. Or take the next major issue coming up—Iran. The overwhelming majority of the population is in favor of diplomatic initiatives rather than confrontation. I don’t even think that’s been reported. It’s certainly not discussed. American public opinion doesn’t count, just as Iraqi public opinion doesn’t count.

Take the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report. It’s quite interesting to read. It’s mostly interesting for what it doesn’t say. One of the things it doesn’t say is what the population of Iraq wants. That’s never mentioned. Actually, it’s interesting how they skirt it. They cite the U.S. government and other Western polls, which do tell us a lot about that. They cite the polls, but not that. They cite the figure correctly that says the proportion of Iraqis who think it’s legitimate to attack American soldiers has increased. It’s now a majority. They cite that. And the conclusion is, well, we have to do something to readjust our tactics so they don’t see us as occupiers, so let’s make a tactical adjustment. Those very same polls, some by the State Department, some by Western polling agencies, say that in Baghdad two-thirds of the population want the U.S. troops out immediately and the large majority in the country as a whole wants a firm timetable for withdrawal in a year or less, maybe six months to a year or something like that. That’s what the Iraqi people want, according to Western, U.S. polls. That’s not mentioned. Just as the opinion of the American people on the issues listed here around Iraq and so on are just not taken into account. That’s deterioration of democratic institutions.

And, yes, there are plenty of positive policies, which are very straightforward, and they come straight from majority opinion.

LET ME just read them. Accept jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court, sign and carry forward the Kyoto Protocols, let the U.N. take the lead in international crises, rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror, keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter, give up the Security Council veto.

LET ME add, that means no use of force except in self-defense.

THAT WOULD be under Article 51.

YES. BUT real self-defense against an ongoing or perhaps imminent armed attack.

AND THE others, cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending. I remember years ago you told me that the United States should be an organizers’ paradise. Do you still feel that way?

I STILL think it’s an organizers’ paradise, and a lot of good things are happening. You see them all over, so do I. The last talk I gave, a couple days ago, happened to be in downtown Boston at the annual meeting of a wonderful group. It’s called City Life/Vida Urbana. They were opening their thirty-fourth year of organizing and activism in the poorest areas of Boston, mostly Latino, Black. A terrific group of people. A lot of people there. They were also very enthusiastic. It was a lively meeting. It was also the opening of a three-day conference of radical organizers from around the country who were doing similar things. All those things are happening, and a lot of them.

They’re scattered. The numbers of people involved are very high, probably higher than the 1960s, I’m convinced, but kind of atomized. The one real success of power systems in the U.S. has been to separate people from one another, so you don’t know what’s happening. I knew very little about this group, though it’s been here for thirty-four years, and very effective, right in my own city. That’s what you see.

ONE COMPONENT of war resistance in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the establishment of GI coffeehouses. There is a documentary film on this called Sir! No Sir! That whole idea is being revived right now. There is one being set up near Fort Drum in upstate New York, where the Tenth Mountain Division is based. Describe the GI coffeehouse movement for people that may not be familiar with it. Was it effective?

IT WAS a support system for soldiers run by the antiwar movement, and it was very effective. The coffeehouses were located near bases. They were just places for soldiers to come, and they could do whatever they wanted. Nobody was trying to propagandize them. There were discussion groups, and if they wanted to join them, fine. Some of the discussion groups were organized by the antiwar activists who set them up, but it was up to them. This had an effect in building up what was a very significant movement. There were also GI-run war-crimes trials, where soldiers and officers would report on what they had done and what they had witnessed.

LIKE THE Winter Soldier investigations and hearings.

THERE WERE a series of them around the country, and they were very effective. I think this is a good time to renew that.

DAVID KRIEGER directs the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara. He asks the question, why are there still nuclear weapons? And he proposes some answers. What would you say to do that?

SIMPLY THAT the nuclear armed states are criminal states. They have a legal obligation, confirmed by the World Court, to live up to Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls on them to carry out good-faith negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely. None of them have lived up to it. The United States has violated it much more than others, it’s in the lead in violating it, especially this administration, which has, in fact, stated that it isn’t subject to Article 6, and has developed new nuclear weapons systems, has dismantled treaties. The Non-Proliferation Treaty is just one of a collection of treaties. The others have been dismantled and are blocked by the Bush administration. In fact, they’ve just entered into an agreement with India, which has just been ratified by Congress, which tears to shreds the central part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

INDIA IS not even a signatory.

INDIA IS not a signatory, and it developed nuclear weapons on its own, which is a real crime.

LIKE PAKISTAN and Israel.

LIKE PAKISTAN and Israel. There is a U.S. law, which the Bush administration has just effectively rescinded, and also an international convention on export of nuclear technology to countries that have violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Of course, developing weapons outside the treaty is even worse. And the Bush administration just effectively endorsed it, which, as Gary Milhollin, one of the main specialists on nuclear weapons, correctly pointed out in an article in Current History, tears the core of the treaty apart. He said it’s going to spread. If the United States can do it, why can’t somebody else do it? So the whole thing will tear apart. And sure enough, shortly afterwards China approached India with a similar deal and approached Pakistan. Once you set the precedent, the most powerful state in the world, yes, others are going to follow.

This is not a joke. The threat of nuclear war is extremely serious, it’s growing. You find people like Robert McNamara—not easily dismissed as a left-wing maniac—talking about “apocalypse soon.” It’s right at the heart of the establishment. You read it all through the strategic analysis literature. There is a growing serious threat of nuclear war, and part of the reason is that the nuclear states, led by the United States, simply refuse to live up to their obligations, and in the case of the United States, are significantly violating them.

EQBAL AHMAD gave a talk here at MIT on the role of intellectuals in October 1998, just about six months before he died in Islamabad. He said, “You have to be willing to take risks.” He was talking about intellectuals. The other thing that Ahmad said was that “love of people is central.”

HE WAS a very close old friend, but I don’t entirely agree with him on that. First of all, we don’t take serious risks here. The risks that people take here for taking dissident positions or even engaging in resistance activities, yes, there are risks but as compared with what most people face in the world, they’re undetectable. Okay, you get denounced by whoever it is, you’re ridiculed, you’re vilified, maybe you can’t get invited to the right dinner parties. But those are risks? Think what people really face. Intellectuals are called intellectuals because they’re privileged. It’s not because they’re smart or they know a lot. There are plenty of people who know more and are smarter but aren’t intellectuals, because they don’t have the privilege. But the people called intellectuals are privileged. They have resources and opportunities, and enough freedom has been won so that the state does not have the capacity to repress. Some but not much. Nowhere near what people claim. There are cases where bad things do happen, intolerable things. People get thrown out of their jobs and stuff like that. Sure, that’s intolerable. But by and large, the risks that privileged people face are very small. So I don’t even think it’s a question of taking risks, it’s a matter of being decent.

Love of people? Yes, of course, or at least commitment to them and their needs.