 Welcome. Thank you already for giving our distinguished guests such a warm welcome yourselves and we appreciate that. I'm Roli Keating, I'm Chief Executive here at the British Library and it is a pleasure to see you all at this very, very special event here. Propaganda is going to be the big theme of the year here at the British Library. Come May the 17th, we'll be opening one of our most substantial exhibitions, Propaganda, Power and Persuasion, which we think is the first time a major national institution has tackled this idea in the round, drawing extensively on our own collections. We're going to be exploring state propaganda in all its forms, in war and peace across the centuries from ancient origins, particular focus on the 20th century and also looking at where we are now and flashing ahead into the future. And this will be surrounded, we hope, by one of the biggest public programmes of events and discussions and debates we've ever had. And nothing could be more appropriate or wonderful than that we kick off this great summer of reflection and debate than to have our guest tonight, probably the best person we could possibly have to stimulate discussion and debate. It's great to have him in London. Last night he was up the road, I think, at the Friends House delivering the Edward W. Said London lecture, tackling in that case the Middle East. Tonight, Noam Chomsky, as I think needing very little introduction, has been at MIT for over 50 years, is of course perhaps the most influential figure in modern linguistics, one of the greats of analytic philosophy. Also, though, of course, the very model of the engaged public intellectuals, someone who brings their wisdom, spirit, intellectual curiosity and passion to bear on the great issues of our time, most famously, most trenchantly perhaps, for his consistent critique of American foreign policy, state capitalism and news media. And I think that may be part of our focus for discussion tonight. Noam has written over 100 books, but one that resonates to this day and I think will for a very, very long time indeed, is manufacturing consent from 1988, which established, yes, the propaganda model or analysis of news media, where 25 years on are we with that thesis. I think that will be one of the questions we explore tonight as collectively we swim in a sea of social media, the internet transforming the provision and shaping of news in front of our eyes. Here at the library we try to collect the news, we collect newspapers, we collect online materials, we try and create a record of how news documents and shapes our world and I can think of no one better to challenge us professionally and intellectually as to how we do that than Noam and I'm looking forward greatly to hearing what he has to say. It remains only for me to say thank you to the Eccles Centre for American Studies based here at the library, it was founded by David and Mary Eccles with a bequest in 1991 and it is one of the ways in which the wonders and depth of our American collections are celebrated year in, year out here and events like this are typical of the kinds of events that the team put on and we're very grateful for that. Also delighted to welcome Jonathan Friedland. He and I worked together in the founding days of BBC Four and it's very nice to be reunited here tonight. Of course you'll have seen Jonathan's work in Britain in the Guardian, you may see him in The New York Times, New York Review of Books and familiar as a voice to millions on Radio 4's the long view connecting past, present and future and I'm sure that's what we're going to hear tonight. Please are distinguished speakers. Thank you. Thank you very much Roli for that warm introduction and Roli really covering the ground of setting up the conversation we have tonight and as he said so aptly our speaker, our guest of honour couldn't be better placed to discuss this subject. What we thought we would do is plunge right in with the flavour of the exhibition that's coming from propaganda, power and persuasion and Noam Chomsky has given me permission to do two things. Firstly to do what doesn't often happen in intellectually hallowed environments like this which is to do a quick fire round which we will do on the screen in a moment but also he tells me very graciously that he, his own children and I'm guessing perhaps grandchildren as well sometimes say in their vaster question please give me the five minute lecture version. So I pass that on because it means that if you see me appearing to be rudely winding up or moving on our honoured guest I have the blessing and permission to do it just as we move on because we've got a lot of ground together. So on with a quick fire round I thought it would be useful before we ask you to give us a very distilled version of what Roli referred to the propaganda model that is the core thesis of manufacturing consent. We just had a look at some examples of propaganda from the exhibition and in a way just to have a quick look at what is and what isn't and I'm going to have a go with this. There we are, I hope everyone can see that. I'm Volkan Reich, I'm Fuhrer, one people, one state I suppose, one Fuhrer from we guess I think the 1930s. This is a Soviet era depiction of a weeping statue of liberty. I'm not sure how clear it is to all of you but we have sort of secret police in the eyes of Lady Liberty, one a truncheon serving as a tear and then this from the wartime period in the United States the artist George, or rather Norman Rockwell, a very different meaning George Rockwell. Norman Rockwell, say freedom of speech by war bonds. Now Noam Chomsky, just start with these three, to the lay eye these all look like examples of propaganda. What would you say? The first one evokes childhood memories which aren't pleasant. There were, it was a very scary period in the 1930s especially if you're Jewish. For me it was, I remember my parents would sometimes play Hitler's speeches on the radio. I couldn't understand the words. He could get the tone and it was very frightening, especially the reaction. And it had a lot of personal meaning for me because we were the only Jewish family in a mostly Irish and German Catholic neighborhood and boys on the street since that was very anti-Semitic. The kids were all going to a Jesuit school and when they came out they were raving anti-Semites. So this was, then they'd calm down later in the afternoon and you could play ball. But I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. I'm the Irish where pro-Nazi because they were Irish and they hated the British and the Germans because they were German. This is off our topic but now that we have a Jesuit pope, did you give it a little tremble when you heard about it? Well it changed enough so that when liberation theology came along I got very close to the Jesuits when I would visit say Nicaragua I often lived in the Jesuit house but it took a while to get over it because these childhood fears can be pretty deep. When I got older I realized it was ridiculous but it's deep. The Hitler imagery was very striking. I remember beer parties when Paris fell. That was the environment. Interestingly I never told my parents. In those days children, at least boys, didn't talk to their parents about personal things. So they never knew. I don't even think they knew what kind of neighborhood we lived in. I mean they didn't know your fear of some of the people in the neighborhood. They didn't have any sense of what the neighborhood was like. They lived in a... They were Hebrew teachers. They lived in a kind of Hebrew ghetto. Not physically but the only people they knew were similar people. I mean I remember women, my mother's friends, all bilingual of course but they would call the... If they had to order something from a downtown department store they'd insist on speaking Hebrew so they'd get a Hebrew translator. There was a big culture conf going on at the time between the Hebrew and the Yiddish diaspora. They were on the Hebrew side. Their language was Yiddish but I never heard a word of Yiddish when I was growing up. Very potent memories for you personally. Or maybe our colleagues there can turn up the volume on the microphones. Here is amplified so we'll take note of that. To move to this painting, this poster from the wartime period, does this count as propaganda as much as that first picture? It's our version of socialist realism. It's basically the same. This was the Second World War of course. I'm trying to stir up patriotism for the Second World War. Actually, it's kind of striking to think about what went on in the First World War. The Second World War, the United States didn't get into it until it was attacked. Some wanted to get in but they didn't. First World War was quite different. The British had the first state propaganda system that I know of. It was called the Ministry of Information, the natural name for a propaganda system. The main purpose of the Ministry of Information was to convince Americans, American intellectuals in particular. This is relevant to the propaganda model. Convince American intellectuals that it was a noble war. During the First World War, intellectuals in every participant country were lauding the magnificence of their own state. The few people who agreed mostly ended up in jail like Richard Russell. They were trying desperately to get the Americans into the war. Woodrow Wilson had been elected in 1916 on a peace platform. Slogan was peace, not victory. They had to somehow turn the population around very quickly and begin to hate everything German. It was very successful. Particularly the progressive American intellectuals, John Dewey's circle of New Republic intellectuals, they turned completely. They convinced themselves that as they put it, this is the first time in history that a country has gone into war because of military leaders and chauvinistic leaders, but because of the intelligent members of the community reflected and decided that this is what had to be done, and then we turned the population around so that they joined us. Of course, the intellectuals, they were being fed ludicrous British propaganda, the kind that was later exposed in the Bryce report, the Belgian children with their arms torn off and all that stuff, and it worked very well. That's kind of set off the modern system of propaganda. I want to get on to particularly your point about the propaganda model, but just before we leave our quick fire round, I want you to look at two newer examples. That's from the Occupy movement, as you said. The 99% have no borders, that's the clue. It's quite a deliberately retro style, but here's a cause. I particularly signalled this out because I thought, here's a cause that broadly you might be sympathetic to, and yet would you apply the label of propaganda to this image? I'm sympathetic to the cause, but I don't like this technique of trying to bring people in. In fact, I can't stand listening to what's called the uplifting rhetoric. It just really turns me off, and for the same reason, this kind of thing. It's an appeal to emotions, not understanding, and it's obvious what it's trying to say. So you don't like it even when it's in the service of a cause? I can't stand it. I mean, I can't listen to Martin Luther King's speeches, literally, although I greatly admire him. Because it's just the style. It's an appeal. It's trying to arouse emotional support for something very significant. I mean, I don't criticise it. It obviously meant something. If you didn't like Martin Luther King, what about this man? Well, that's extreme. You can see the effect it had on the funeral. It was just worship. In fact, about the only thing like it outside of Kim Il-sung, maybe, was Ronald Reagan's death. It was treated like a king had died. In fact, you can read publications of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a serious research outfit, describing Reagan as a colossal figure whose spirit hovers over us like a warm and friendly ghost. Actually, George Washington was treated the same way. The colonies had to create some sort of sense of national identity. I mean, the term United States was plural until the Civil War. There's a lot of states. They tried to create a national identity. You needed a heroic figure. In the early 19th century, there was a George Washington cult that was where you get these cherry tree stories and all that business. It was all concocted to try to show that he was practically not human. He was a noble gentleman. Some of it's very funny. For example, if you go to the Capitol building today, there's a statue of George around 1830, I think, of Washington in the style of a Greek god, you know, his Zeus. And there was criticism of it. But the criticism was because he was wearing a toga and his shoulder was showing. But other than that, that's fine. He was God, you know, the perfect Roman. And this would fit that category of myth-making. It's the same kind of thing. And it leaves you cold regardless of the cause. That was by way of preamble, really, and it's been very instructive already, this notion of myth-making. A lot of people in this room will have read manufacturing consent. Quite a few will have read it several times and committed it to memory. But for those who haven't, and I'm quoting now your children, if you can give us the distilled version, the five-minute lecture on what the propaganda model is, and you wrote the book originally in 1988, and then I want to push you on how that stands now. Well, actually, I should say that most of the work on the propaganda model itself is due to my colleague, Edward Herman. He's a professor of finance. In fact, professionally, he was a specialist in corporate power and corporate control, wrote the standard work on it. I mean, I agreed with it, but I can't take credit for it. It was mostly his initiative, and I didn't totally agree for reasons, I'll tell you. But what it is is a discussion of the institutional structure of the media. It's looking at the US media, so not state media, but corporate media. And it asks an obvious question. If you look at the institutional structure and you ask what content you would expect to flow from it, what would you predict? And briefly, without going into the details, the media are huge corporations, parts of larger conglomerates. They sell, like other businesses, they sell a product to a market. The market is other businesses, advertisers. The product is people. So they sell people to advertisers. So television, for example, makes no profit if you turn on the tube, but they get it from the advertisers. And the newspapers mostly lose money when you subscribe. They do better from the advertising. So the first part of it is it's major corporations selling people to other corporations. And then there are other factors. It's very easy to show that the corporate system is very tightly linked to government, that people flow it out. And then the government itself produces just plain state propaganda, and that enters. And other factors like that. Now we ask, well, what would you expect to happen? What you'd expect to see overwhelmingly is a choice of issues and framing of issues which reflects the interests and concerns of the state corporate nexus. That's what you'd predict. And then the rest of the book is running through examples. It's been a little misunderstood. A lot of journalists regarded as a criticism of journalists. It's exactly the opposite. In fact, about a third of the book, the latter third I suspect nobody ever read it, is a defensive journalist against attacks from liberals from Freedom House. Freedom House wrote a vicious attack, a couple volumes of attacks on American journalists for stabbing the United States in the back in Vietnam and losing the Vietnam War and so on. Two volumes, one commentary and the other, the documentary background for it. I'm kind of a masochist, so I actually read the documents. I'm probably the only person who ever read them. When you read the documents, you find that the commentary is totally falsified. In fact, what it shows is that the journalists did an honest, courageous job what they saw, they described accurately and the criticisms are mostly fabricated. But they did it within the framework of an interpretation which is super chauvinistic. So, for example, if the United States carried out some atrocity, it was a mistake or the other side somehow caused it to do it and then they leave things out. But the actual reporting was first rate and I think you can trust it. It's typically the case. So it's a defensive journalism which the journalist didn't like. How is the journalist able to do that kind of reporting that you do trust if they are simultaneously framing it in a way that you don't trust? It's honest professionals. They have integrity, especially working in the field takes a lot of courage and they do an excellent job. But within a narrow structure, like certain topics that just won't report, it might be editorial pressure. When they do report it, the framework is essentially a patriotic framework. You can see it all the time. We give lots of examples. In the book you say that the media distinguishes between worthy victims and unworthy victims. Worthy victims tend to be the victims of the United States enemies and unworthy victims are those who are the victims of the United States. The United States are its clients. So when the Russians invade Afghanistan, the Afghans are worthy victims because the enemy is attacking them. In fact, reporting from Afghanistan during the Russian invasion was from the side of the Mujahideen. That's where reporters went to work with the guerrillas. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, it's exactly the opposite. Reporters didn't go work with the Taliban. They reported from the point of view of the American army. I'm interested in how sincere your expression of admiration for journalists is. I want to push you on how sincere your admiration that you expressed before for journalists, how sincere can that be if you're saying that they locate themselves on this side or that side depending on what's going on. They accept the frame and the narrative. That sounds like a criticism to me. Actually, that's the one point in which Edd and I somewhat disagreed about the whole thing. I think to have the book referred to the media is too narrow because I think that applies to the whole intellectual class. That's the way intellectuals are overwhelmingly, all through history. Intellectuals overwhelmingly are servants of power. Now, intellectuals write history. So when you read what they write, they look very noble and adversarial and so on. But when you look at what actually happened there, all the criticisms we make of the media apply to them, and that's significant because none of the institutional factors hold in that case. The institutional factors that we looked at have to do with the corporate structure, the advertisers who purchase it. That doesn't apply to the academy? That doesn't apply to a college professor. There are other pressures, but not those. But the outcome is pretty much the same. This is again slightly off the top, but if that is the case, what made you so different? In other words, if even intellectuals are subsumed into this. Always a fringe of dissidents. Any society you look at, there's a fringe of dissidents. They're treated badly, usually. This goes back to the earliest recorded history. So I got classical Greece. Who drank the hemlock? It was the guy who was corrupting the youth by worshiping false gods. It wasn't the guys who followed orders. Or take a look at the same time, the other ancient records we have are the biblical records. In the biblical records, there are people who we would call intellectuals. In the English translations, it's called prophets. That's a bad translation of a very obscure Hebrew word which nobody understands. They weren't prophets. They didn't prophesy. They were dissident intellectuals. They condemned the evil king. They gave geopolitical analysis. They said, you're leading us into disaster. You should be merciful to widows and orphans. These are dissident intellectuals. How were they treated? They were imprisoned, thrown into the desert. One of them, Elijah, was called a hater of Israel. A hater of Israel by the epitome of evil in the Bible, King Ahab. That's the first use that I know of this notion of self-hating Jew. It's King Ahab referring to Prophet Elijah. They were all treated badly. There were people who were treated well, the flatters at the court. A couple of centuries later, they were condemned as false prophets. That's very typical. I don't know a society where that's not true. I've heard it said, just on this point about you, that if the argument that you've just advanced in manufacturing concept was completely right, the book should have gone nowhere and you should have been an obscure figure who was shoved to the margins. But the fact that you are this giant figure and the book is still cited and quoted. It's because of me. It's because of the popular movement. When I started giving talks about the Vietnam War in the early 1960s, I was giving talks in somebody's living room or a church with four people, the minister, the organizer, a guy who wanted to kill me and a drunk who walked off the streets. That went on for quite a while. Finally, a popular movement developed and when popular movements developed, people who have some degree of privilege can float above them. Actually, the same was true of Martin Luther King. I'm sure he would have been the first to say if it hadn't been for young students sitting in and lunch counters and riding freedom buses and getting beaten to a pulp by state troopers and everything that grew from that, nobody would have heard him either. I said to you that we were going to just challenge a few things about it. The book was written in 1988. Since then, we've had this explosion of other media, social media, the internet, obviously. Access is now available to many who would at least consider themselves. I want to hear if you think they would be right, but they would consider themselves outside the corporate media. They have their own voices separate to that exchange and need for advertising, etc. In fact, just to illustrate the point, I tweeted earlier today that I was going to have this conversation with you and elicited this question from a Chris Wood here in Britain who said, can we still talk about dominance or hegemony in a world where there are so many competing sources of information and propaganda, the internet and blogs and Twitter, etc. Does this change in the last 25 years render any part of your thesis out of this? It's not a great change. When I was growing up in the 1930s, there were all sorts of radical newspapers of every imaginable kind. In fact, as a kid, I'd go down to the Philadelphia Public Library, or analogue to this, not the same, obviously, and spend Saturday afternoon reading radical periodicals, every imaginable kind, and I got what they were like. But there were other interpretations. Now, sources of information is not exactly correct because the internet access makes that easier. I don't have to go downtown to the library, I can punch something on my computer, but it's not that different. They are not really sources of information. The information is still coming from journalists in the field. Is that right? I'm thinking of some of the Arab awakenings in Egypt and other places. People were reporting as I witnessed this immediately in real time. It wasn't going through the filter of any journalist. That's how we found out about it. The internet and social media were used for organising in Tahrir Square. But take a look at what happened when Mubarak tried to stop it by closing down the internet. It turned out it accelerated it because people just contacted one another in other ways. That is a profound change, isn't it? Because there you're saying that the authoritarian who in the past could have shut down the six state newspapers. He couldn't have shut down that. If they had, then people would have reacted the same way by face-to-face communication. You've got lots of ways of communicating, and that's just what they did in Tahrir Square. In fact, it didn't even hinder the demonstrations. So you don't feel that we're in any way made a change in sort of... It's a change, but not in kind. It's much less of a change than, say, from the creation of libraries. That was a much bigger change. That gave people access to huge amounts of material that before that they couldn't have. Comparison, the internet is a small change, which is fine. I use it all the time. I'm not criticising it. But it's a little different from libraries, crucially different. In the case of libraries, you could be pretty confident that what you would read in the library is more or less serious. It had some value, otherwise it wouldn't have been preserved and stayed there. When you look at the internet, an awful lot of it is just total garbage. If you approach it without any framework of understanding, which is what happens quite often, it can just be a source of deception. That's how a lot of contemporary cults develop. I know you told me before that you consider yourself a technophobe. You don't use social media yourself. Social media at all. I don't like them for other reasons. It seems to me they create... I can see with my grandchildren. They create very superficial appearances of relationships. Like a kid thinking of a case will write on Facebook, having an exam this afternoon, and immediately 100 so-called friends will write back because she never heard from saying, gee, I hope you do well. The kid thinks she has 100 friends. There's nothing. It's just replacing real friends by virtual friends. For somebody who doesn't use social media, I think you've got quite a good grasp of the teenage thing going on there. I've got an experimental subject. I should promise that we are going to open this out to wider conversation and soon. There's a couple of areas I just want to probe before we do. Another change that's happened besides the internet change has been a kind of fragmentation of the big media that was still there in a big way in 1988. A decline of the big city newspapers would be one phenomenon. For example, cable television. There is now Fox News on the right and an MSNBC News on the left. That feels like a proliferation, a range of views. Or for you, are they just two heads of the same corporate beast? I think if you look over the last... My lifetime, my conscious lifetime, the last 70 years, there's been a narrowing of media, a sharp narrowing in England, too. Remember that as late as the 1960s, the British tabloids, which, beyond junk, were serious newspapers, mainly Labour newspapers and pretty serious ones. The New York Post, which is a tabloid. That was the left-wing newspaper. Now it's beyond idiocy. The Daily Herald, I think it was, was the best-selling newspaper in England until the early 60s. It was a social-democratic Labour newspaper. It also had a lot of loyalty, reader loyalty. People read it and it was serious. It couldn't survive capital concentration and advertising. If you look back from the 19th century to today, there's been a sharp narrowing of media. In the 19th century, there was a huge proliferation of media. Labour press, ethnic press, all kinds of things. All these things are now there, aren't they, on the internet? All these things are there now, aren't they, on the internet? Blogs for every possible political strand? There were serious newspapers that people participated in. It wasn't just anything that comes to mind. I'll write it down. They were committed and they're very interesting. In fact, there's a very good book, which maybe some of you have read, on the reading habits of the British working class. Jonathan Rose, a big 800-page book. It's fascinating. He points out, he concludes, that working people in England had a richer cultural life than the aristocrats, because they were really reading serious work. The same in the United States. Take a look at the Labour press in the late 19th century. The press was written by Irish artisans from going to the mills, what they called factory girls, young women from the farms who were essentially being driven into the mills as the early industrial revolution. It's very interesting. Very insightful. For them, there was no marks, no European socialists had never heard about that. They were just writing from their own experience of the degrading character of the industrial system, which was destroying their culture, their independence, and, in fact, one of the interesting things, which is relevant, one of the things they denounced was what they called, this is 1850, the new spirit of the age, gain wealth for getting all but self. Did you ever hear that? That was the new spirit of the age in 1850, and they were bitterly condemning it. There's been 150 years of intense propaganda to get this sociopathic concept into people's heads. They were resisting it much less now. Even in my childhood, there was still a wide proliferation of newspapers. In Philadelphia where I lived, in those days there was a morning paper and an evening paper, and then you got the New York papers. It was quite a range. Certainly the counter-cultural view that media have narrowed rather than widened, let me just get your quick responses on three things and then we're going to open it up. The first one is something going on in Britain at the moment. Part of the thesis of manufacturing consent is that there is this convergence between the politics and the corporate interests. Right now, more or less, as you landed here, there is this proposal from the government, in fact, from all the political parties, to have a form of regulation that will be underpinned or backed by law, so the state. On the other hand, the people opposing it are the big corporate newspaper groups. There's this divergence of interest. Each one says they're doing the right thing, and the corporate business voice says we're speaking for freedom of expression. Given that you lump the two together, you fuse the together in the argument, where do you stand with this argument? Who's right in this argument? I haven't read the report yet, so I really can't comment on it. I wouldn't hold you back in this environment. I can't comment on it if it's even published. Divergences between the corporate sector and the state are extremely interesting. They do happen on major issues, and they're very revealing, and the way intellectuals and the media deal with them is revealing. So take, for example, the U.S. crusade against Cuba. It's been going on for 50 years in virtually total isolation. The United States practically didn't kick out of the Western Hemisphere because of so much opposition. When it comes up in the United Nations, the votes are 180 to two United States and Israel. If you take a look at... It's very vicious. It includes a lot of terrorism, serious terrorism, strangulation of the economy, and it goes back to Kennedy, who was kind of insane about it, and it's persisted. And there's two interesting things about this. A public opinion on this has been studied for about 40 years. The public is overwhelmingly in favor of normalization. Okay, it's normal for public opinion to be disregarded. That's what we call democracy. But what's interesting in this case is that the corporate sector is opposed. Big sectors of it, agribusiness, energy, pharmaceuticals. These are the guys who usually set policy, and they're opposed to it. But the state interest in punishing disobedience overwhelms the pressure from the corporate sector. I think that tells us something about international affairs. It says something about the... Some people, if they crudely summarise your politics, would say you imagine the politicians are merely the tools of corporate interests. Here's an example where they are sovereign. They're making a decision against corporate interests. There are sometimes transcendent state interests. It's not so much Congress. It's the executive. They see themselves mostly as responsible for the overall health of the corporate system, not the parochial interests of particular corporations. For them, it's a crucial necessity. This runs right through the Cold War much earlier to treat the world kind of like the mafia. In fact, I think that's the major principle of international affairs. You don't read it in journals, but I think international affairs can very well be... A lot of it can be understood on the mafia model. The Godfather does not brook disobedience. If some small grocer doesn't pay protection money, which the Godfather wouldn't even notice, they don't accept that. They don't send the goons in to get the money. They get the goons in to beat them to a pulp. Others will understand that disobedience is not tolerating. What would be an example of that in international affairs? Cuba. It's a very free country in the United States. We have rich documentary records. Nobody looks at it, so it doesn't matter much. But if you look at it, it's very revealing. The primary concern about Cuba under Kennedy was what they called successful defiance of U.S. policy going back to the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. No Russians. Just the principle that the hemisphere has to be obedient to us. These guys are not only defying it, but they're getting away with it. You've just mentioned that you've conceded, if you like. The United States is a very free country. You've talked before, elsewhere, about the so-called freedom of expression in the United States. There's a lot of debate going on about the United States being in decline and losing its place perhaps to China. How do you maybe don't get into the question of whether the U.S. is going to be overtaken? More narrowly, how the United States freedom of expression and propaganda to other countries is the propaganda less coercive in the United States than it is, say, in China? Is there a freer expression? Much more sophisticated. In fact, some of these images illustrate it. U.S. commercial propaganda, which grew out of the wartime experience of this great success and what they call a manufacturing consent. That's not our term. An intellectual, Walter Lipman, leading public intellectual. It was very successful. Out of that grew the public relations industry. It's guru came out of the propaganda commission in the First World War. Very impressed. Then commercial advertising was created. Now it was called propaganda then. The founding document of the public relations industry written in the late 20s by Edward Brineis was someone who had been in Wilson's Propaganda Commission. He called his book Propaganda. It gives the standard doctrines of the intellectual classes, which goes back to the English Civil War. The people are rabble. They're stupid and ignorant. They're meddlesome outsiders, I'm quoting. For their own benefit, we have to take care of them. It's straight out of Lenin. It's almost identical with Leninist vanguardism. People don't understand. We're the responsible men. We understand. For their benefit, we have to engineer consent. We have to control the minds of the people so that they do the right thing. That's our task. That's what propaganda is for, whether it's state or commercial. The commercial cases were interesting. Brineis himself made his reputation and became a great figure because of the first major advertising campaign that he ran. In those days, in the 1920s, women didn't smoke. Manufacturers realized there was a big market out there losing. He was hired to convince women to smoke. He ran campaigns in which models would walk down Fifth Avenue holding cigarettes and presenting the image. You want to be cool and modern, like the models you should smoke. He made tens of millions of corpses. He became a liberal hero for this. That's what commercial advertising was then until today. It was very much admired. Goebbels picked up. He was very impressed by American commercial propaganda. It was called propaganda advertising. We called it now. In fact, the Nazi propaganda was modeled on it. He describes in detail how Goebbels, simple images appealed to the emotions and all that. The Nazis picked it up and ran with it. The Bolsheviks tried. That Bolshevik picture is an example, but they were too crude to get away with it. The Bolshevik propaganda you can barely believe. Given the sophistication of it, you used the word sophistication, does that mean... You said how sophisticated it operates in the United States, but does it mean that you would trust information that you got in the American media less than information you would read in the Chinese media? Chinese media is a joke. I was in China a couple of years ago, and I can't read Chinese, but they have an English newspaper. You can kind of watch television and figure out what they're talking about. Anything written was so comical. You couldn't believe it, but what was interesting was what they didn't report. When I got back to the United States after a week in China, I discovered that there had been a massive traffic jam from Mongolia to Beijing with trucks sitting there for days because they couldn't get through. Nobody knew about it. There wasn't a word about it there. For all your criticisms of the American media, there's still value in it. You still regard it as free, relatively. It's free because the United States has very little government coercion, but it has enormous obedience, which is kind of striking. I think that relates to what I said about the intellectual class. There's no coercion at all. The only coercion is maybe you won't get a good review or something, but it's not like being sent to a torture chamber. I'm glad you made the distinction. Before we open it up, I wanted to cite another response that came in when I offered people on Twitter to suggest questions to you. One of them was this about Serb propaganda in the Serb propaganda. The suggestion was that I should ask you, why did he endorse Serb propaganda and imply the Omasca and Trinoplole camps were invented? Shameful, said this person on Twitter, and it was actually the person sending it was somebody who had themselves lived in Sarajevo during the siege of Sarajevo, who said, I was in Sarajevo at the time I could see very well from where mortars and bullets were coming, etc. You've had this battle with a few people publicly. I never said anything about the Balkans, but I wrote about Kosovo, but said practically nothing about the Balkans. But I don't understand exactly what was said. He says we accepted Serb propaganda. The criticism was you had, and the particular claim is you know centres on Srebrenica, and the idea that you have cast out on Srebrenica, what I said is you should tell the truth about it instead of lying. I do believe that, I think it's useful to tell the truth. But in England, particularly in the early 90s, it was quite dramatic. British journalists and intellectuals seized on the Serb atrocities, which were real, with just love. Finally they had a chance to condemn somebody else and seemed very noble by agreeing with 100% of opinion. That's irresistible. You start getting ludicrous propaganda coming out, including the left press. It just became a passion. You couldn't tell the truth about it. When Srebrenica, you said you wanted to tell the truth. Tell the truth. Those journalists who were there, who reported on it, believed the truth was a massacre. Well, there really weren't journalists there. They reported afterwards. The truth is, if you want to go back a few months, that the Bosnian armies, Srebrenica was a protected base, theoretically. Nobody could get in, presumably. The Muslim armies were using it as a base to attack Serbian villages outside. They were very frank and open about it. Nathar Oric, the head of the militias, bragged to the press. It was reported in the United States, the Bosnian Post and so on, that he was sending his troops out into the Serb villages and beheading people and torturing them. Then they go back into the safe zone. It was pretty clear that sooner or later there was going to be a response to this. What he then did was pull out his militias. When the Serbs came in, which they did in reaction, they were kind of surprised. There was no military defence. Then they carried out a lot of atrocities. The Serb forces did? The Serb forces did. It's called genocide. I don't use the word genocide much. The way it's used strikes me as a kind of Holocaust denial. To use genocide when you kill a bunch of people you don't like that demeans the victims of the Holocaust, I think. So I rarely use the word. I don't think it's used properly. But to kill, say, a couple of thousand men in a village after you've allowed the women and children to escape, in fact, truck them out, that doesn't count as genocide. It's a horror story, but it's not genocide. I mean, people claim and would argue that their figure is much higher than that. Well, the figures are debated, but then you don't really know. I mean, the highest figures that are given are around 8,000. But it's not from... There's been an intensive effort to... when enemies carry out an atrocity, this huge effort that goes into finding every piece of a bone and the DNA analysis and try to get the biggest number you can. When we carry out a comparable atrocity, nobody even investigates. And the Bosnian woman who wrote to me on Twitter said that you were often cited, she said, by Serb propaganda. Professor Chomsky agrees with us. No, I never say. Does that trouble you if you were being held up, prayed in aid by the Serbs? No, you can't... I'm quoted by Iranian propaganda because I say things critical about the United States. You can't help that. I can't help what they do. But I think we're going to tell the truth about it. And the truth is it was an atrocity, but nothing like what is claimed in, say, the British press, bad atrocity. And this is also true of the camps. That's an interesting story. And there were a couple of detention and concentration camps. The first one that was investigated was a Guardian reporter at Villami and some ITN TV people. And they reported on this camp, which they described as a detention camp. They pointed out that you weren't forced to stay there. You could read the early reports, the eyewitness reports. People could get out if you wanted. We're holding them there, but not a concentration camp. Later, the story changed. It became Auschwitz, same journalist, incidentally. Reported as Auschwitz in Europe. They just changed the story, not on the basis of new evidence. It's just the mood changed. There was a small newspaper, kind of crazy newspaper, L.M. that was called. It's had four people or something. They sent a photographer to the camps who took photographs and essentially confirmed the original story. You're not claiming the original story was faked? No, I think it was an eyewitness story. A reporter gives an eyewitness script and it's usually true. So I assume it was true. British reporters. Then what happened is interesting. ITN and the Guardian incidentally went after L.M. in order to destroy it. They relied on these utterly scandalous British libel laws, which are international scandal, and do make it possible for a big corporation to put a tiny newspaper out of business. They can't pay the legal costs and so on. Then there was euphoria about it. They said, great, we managed to put out a business, a tiny newspaper which published something we don't like. But then something else happened. The most respected photojournalist, maybe anywhere, certainly here, Phillip Knightley, looked into it. He's a very respected work, goes back to the Spanish Civil War. He did an analysis and he concluded that the L.M. analysis was probably correct. He didn't accuse anyone of distortion. If you look at it, it's probably correct. He also wrote a very interesting article addressed to the British journalists, said you ought to learn something about freedom of the press. I don't think either of these things was ever published. No, I was just going to say for the record, obviously ITN and the Guardian would say that they had been accused of faking evidence and therefore they had to respond very strongly. George Montbier, somebody who admires you tremendously in every area, says just on this issue he feels you're just on the wrong side. But I'd like to see some more argument. Let's see, because obviously we've got bigger themes and topics here. We might be good idea to bring up the lights a little bit. I don't need bigger themes but other themes. Let's take some questions from Professor Chomsky. I think we started a few minutes later. I'm going to give us some added time. Gentleman here had his hand up early if there's a microphone that we can go there in this front row. And if somebody with a microphone or you just want to say ask something, you're really standing up, that's very enthusiastic. Is there a second microphone that we can get? So why don't we get it to the person who's already on his feet? We'll take two or three at a time. Professor Chomsky, thank you for your remarks. I report on the environment and I'm interested in language about the environment. So we have a consistent narrative in this country about the notion of limitless growth. This is almost unchallenged, the thought that we can carry on growing forever. Recently David Cameron talked about us being in a global race and we had to be among the winners. But nobody asked who the losers would be and when the race would ever end. I'm just wondering in this case whether it's a question of manufactured consent or just the lack of a good alternative. I'm going to take two or three at a time. I'll bring the exemplary question from our colleague from the BBC but we need them to be shorter than that if we're going to get through lots. Brevity from you if you can. Hello, Professor Chomsky. Thank you very much for being here. Enjoy your work. My question is a little bit more specific about exploitation. I'm not too sure how many people in the room has an iPhone or night trainers which I'm wearing. So my question basically is shall we just improve the working standard of kids who are making our iPhones and shoes in China or in various other countries for us to basically keep checking our Facebook? Or shall we just throw our iPhones away? Good, thank you. I got that and I'll repeat it back to the Professor when we're here. Have we got the microphone for this questioner here and maybe we'll get one more in and we'll do lots of rounds so don't worry. What are your thoughts about the rise of Chinese power on the world stage, please? Good, you were about to begin on that and I prevented you. Why don't we just tack on one more since the microphone is there? Hi, thank you very much for coming. I wanted to ask you a question earlier. I think you referred to comparison between the internet and libraries, but I was just thinking to myself isn't the comparison a little bit closer to the development of the printing press and isn't the nature of improvement a more valid information helped by that because people will then start speaking to each other, communicating scientific articles and stuff which will drive up development. You've written some really interesting stuff but it's become more interesting over time because people have said it's rubbish or it's only partly right or whatever and you've had to adapt to that and develop it. The libraries have become full of much more valid truthful. Thank you. Good. I'm going to... Don't worry, we're going to have other rounds to do that. So why don't we just go with that last question? The questioner said that you had in some way said that the internet was not such a profound change, that the library was a much bigger change and he was saying actually that maybe this is akin more to the printing press, the invention of the printing press and that actually it would improve quality of ideas and debate because people will share and exchange ideas globally in a way they couldn't do before. The printing press was a huge change. I mean it dwarfs anything we're talking about. The libraries were a major change. The internet from this point of view is a small change and has mixed effects. As I mentioned, there's no quality control, peer review, which is okay. People should be able to say anything they want but it makes it much less useful than say a library as a source of information. Now the interchange of ideas is fine but you know we had... I mean take say interchange of ideas between Britain and the United States, two countries that were pretty close. The biggest change in that kind of interchange came when sailing ships were replaced by steamboats or by the telegraph. It meant it's 19th century. Instead of waiting several months to get an answer to a letter, the telegraph would get it instantly, steamboats pretty much. Now it's faster but if you think about it in terms of increments, it's not huge. It's not as much as the others. Instantly that's true of many other things so say the invention of indoor plumbing had a much bigger effect on health standards than modern medicine. All these things are fine but we shouldn't exaggerate. So Google get to the back of the queue behind the toilet is basically the argument. I think that covers the ground that you'd also spoken about earlier. I wanted to push you on the next point because I cut you off. You were about this China and US decline thesis. The questioner asked about the rise of China and what you think about that and particularly relevant to pop-prop again. It's very common to talk about US decline. In fact, we read the main foreign policy journals. It's one of the main topics. Is America over, America decline? Well, first of all we should put that in perspective. The peak of American power was in 1945. At that point the US totally dominated the world. It had half the world's wealth. It gained a lot during the Second World War. Industrial production quadrupled. Every possible competitor was devastated or destroyed. The security situation was incomparable. It was just enormous power and American planners understood it and they laid plans to how to run the world. It's quite sophisticated and interesting. That started the decline within four years. One of the plans was that the US would control all of Asia. That's why other countries were not permitted to participate in the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the Japan Peace Treaty. Most of the Asian countries refused to participate except Salon, I think. It was a British colony at the time. The US insisted that the only Japanese crimes should be from 1941 on. They had already fought ten years of war under Japanese imperialism. Those were the worst crimes. It was specifically on China. Let's talk about China. That was 1949. 1945. In 1949, a very significant event occurred. It's called the loss of China. China was supposed to be a part of the American Empire. This event moved to independence. The phrase is interesting. I can't lose your computer. I can lose my computer. The loss of China means we own it, obviously. In fact, we own the world. We lost it. One of the big issues in American domestic politics ever since then is who's responsible for the loss of China. Nobody even questions that. It's a good example of how good propaganda really works. It presupposes that we own the world and then you discuss things within that assumption. It goes on like that, the loss of China, the loss of the Middle East and so on. The decline continued. The world got more complicated. Let's talk about China. China has had a spectacular growth rate. It's a very poor country. You take a look at the Human Development Index. Last time I looked, I think it was 90th. All the western countries are way up on top. It's got enormous internal problems. Ecological problems. It's got a very militant labor movement. Thousands, tens of thousands of labor actions every year protesting the repression. It's a major exporter, manufacturing exporter. But take a close look. It's mostly an assembly plant. So if you buy an iPad or one of those things, it's assembled in China and it's called a Chinese export. But the value added in China is very slight. It almost all comes from the surrounding industrial countries in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the West. Slowly China will move up the technology ladder and in some domains they've actually done it. So you're sounding a sceptical note there about this rise of China. It's real. You've been a critic all your working life of American imperialism and American domination. If, and I know it's obviously from what you just said a big if, but if China does eventually overtake, would it be better to live in a China-dominated world than it's been to live in a US-dominated world? It's like asking about a Martian-dominated world. It is so remote from reality that there's not much point thinking about it. But you've obviously been a critic of US imperialism so I'm just imagining a world without US imperialism. Is that Martian? Does that ever happen? I don't think it's in the cards. I mean US decline has continued. The world power is much more diverse now than it was in the past. In fact, the biggest part of American decline is quite striking is what they call the loss of Latin America. I mean Latin America was supposed to be in the back pocket. That's the back yard. They do whatever we say. Now Latin America has become remarkably independent. In fact, there was a case a couple of weeks ago, which maybe was coverage here. I didn't see it. What happened was reported but not its meaning. There was a study that came out by the Open Society Institute called Globalizing Torture of Rendition, which is a terrible crime, and it studied the countries that participated in the US Globalizing Torture Campaign. It included most of Europe, England, Sweden, and so on. It included the Middle East because that's where people were sent to be tortured by the dictatorships. It included Asia, it included Africa. One continent was totally missing. Not a single Latin American country was willing to participate. This is doubly significant. For one thing, that was always, as I said, the back yard. They did what we said. Furthermore, as long as the US ran it, it was the torture capital of the world. That's just 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago. Now it's totally free. It's interesting the way that's interpreted in the literature. There's an article coming out in Foreign Affairs, the establishment journal, by one of the Michael Schifter, one of the leading specialists on Latin America. He describes how up till 20 years ago, everything was going wonderfully in Latin America. Countries were modernizing. They accepted the Washington consensus. In fact, they were getting ruined, but forget about that. In fact, they were revolting against it. Everything was going great. They were moving towards democracy and markets and the influence of the United States. Then something bad happened. An evil demon appeared, Hugo Chavez. He destroyed everything. Because of him, Latin America is going off in this crazy direction. He didn't say this, but they don't participate in globalizing torture and so on. Chavez is regarded as an evil demon in the Western press. In fact, the coverage of Chavez is astonishing. There's plenty to criticize, not criticized it, but the treatment of his is like, I don't know what, Hitler or something like that. To the extent that the ceremony at the funeral, if you read the American press that says, he's the funeral Ahmadine judge. You're the one who compared him to Reagan. I don't know whether he's going to recover from that. I want to get your questions to that question. What actually happened is that every country in the Western Hemisphere, except the US and Canada, sent the president most of the clear days of morning. Lula wrote a very supportive comment on him. This is all the right-wing presidents, Piniera, Santos and others. The US sent delegation, which the leading member was a nice guy. He's a former congressman, former congressman and health representatives who was kind of involved in Latin America. That's the US delegation. All of our clients sent presidents and declared days of morning. But try to find something about this. Let's get you on the two questions which I'm going to link. The first one was about limitless growth. The idea that despite the impact that it's going to have on the climate and on the environment, is that to an example of manufactured consent? I think it links a little bit with this point about our desire for, and this is the question I think you didn't quite hear, but the desire for iPhones and Nike trainers, means that we are exploiting labour in China and other places. I think the question was asking advice really. What should we do? Should we demand improved standards? Or should we just stop buying those kind of goods? They're both questions that relate to this global pursuit of growth. The first question about the environment is probably the most important question there is. The human species has come to a point where it can and probably will destroy the possibility for decent survival. And it's not that remote, you know, our grandchildren. And it's pretty severe. There's an overwhelming consensus of scientists. The consensus has consistently turned out to be too conservative. It's worse than they predicted. You can read the science journals every week. There's some new story about it. And the effects are quite interesting. Most of the... There's one out of 110 relevant countries. There's one that has no national program for the environment and has no program for renewable energy, national program, the United States. Would this be another example of manufacturing? The manufacturing center is extremely interesting. If you look at public opinion in the United States, it's a huge propaganda campaign in the United States. It's quite open, incidentally. Chamber of Commerce, business, lobby, petroleum industry, and so on. I've announced that they're running a campaign, a huge campaign to convince Americans that it's all nonsense, that humans don't have anything to do with it. It's not happening anyway, and so on. And it's had a slight effect. Americans tend to be somewhat more skeptical of global warming and its consequences than other countries. But not a huge effect. The American population is much closer to the scientific consensus than the media and policy. And that's quite interesting. And it's led to... There's a new campaign that's just underway by an organization called the ALIC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. It's a corporate lobby heavily funded by corporations and coach brothers and all those nice guys. What they do is write legislation for state legislatures to try to get state legislatures to accept legislation. And they've got a lot of clout, so they get a lot of them in. You can imagine what they're about. They just started a new one, which is quite interesting from the point of view of propaganda. They're concerned about the fact that the American population is paying too much attention to the scientific consensus. So what the new program is designed to do in the states, and a couple of states have already adopted it, is to introduce what they call balanced teaching in the K-12, the kindergarten, the 12th grade educational system. A balanced teaching means that along with teaching, the overwhelming consensus of scientists, whatever your national academy says, what all the science journal says, along with that you teach climate change denial. And that's balanced teaching. And it's in the interest of critical education, getting children to be critical and so on. It shows the desperation of the corporate propaganda system and its failure to drive the population totally off the international spectrum. The public opinion, as I mentioned, doesn't affect policy much, so the United States has no policies in this respect. I do want to get more people in. Do you have an answer to the man who was asking about iPhones and things that require exploited labor or underpaid labor, child labor even? Everything else. If you eat your dinner, a lot of it is coming from super exploited farm workers under horrible conditions. You can't look at anything in a capitalist system which doesn't involve extensive exploitation, we should have iPhones or not. I don't have one, but if people like them, okay, nothing wrong with it. However, the endless growth is a problem. In fact, it's quite interesting. Here's another thing which is not being discussed and should be. If there's ever a historian century from now, there may not be, but if we don't succeed in destroying civilization which we're trying hard to do, and there are historians around, and they look back at what's happening now, they'll be astonished. The evidence for the climate serious problem, maybe catastrophe is overwhelming, and there are various reactions to it. At one extreme, there are groups that are trying to do something about it. If you take a look, they're mostly indigenous societies, the uncivilized part of the world, the Canadian First Nations, the Australian aboriginals. In Latin America, it's quite striking because there's a substantial indigenous population there. They didn't wipe them all out the way the English colonists did. They're much more efficient. So there's a pretty big indigenous population, and the countries that have a strong indigenous population, they're way in the lead in doing something about it. The most interesting case is Ecuador. Under the pressure, it's an oil exporter, but under the pressure of the indigenous communities, Ecuador is the only oil exporter in the world that's trying to keep the oil in the ground. They're asking the European Union for aid to help them not lift the oil, keeping the ground where it ought to be. I'm not going to get the aid, but at least they're trying. When you go to the richest countries, the United States and Canada, they are hell bent on trying to make the crisis as bad as possible. Very enthusiastic about finding every imaginable way to use fossil fuels and let's go to disaster as quickly as possible. That's what's happening in the world. There are things to say about this, but try to find them. Let's take it around here. We've got about 13 or 14 minutes left before we run out. Brief questions and we'll try to get brief answers too. Who's got the microphone at the moment? You go first and we'll get the microphone down, and then we're going to go to you. Do you see the potential for a narcosyndicalism to flourish once more as it did in Spain during the 1930s? Potential for what? A narcosyndicalism to flourish once more as it did in Spain in the 1930s, if so, where? OK, that may be up your street. Professor Chomsky? Professor Chomsky, how would you explain the decline of popular participation in formal political processes in the West? I'm talking about lower waters turnouts, declining party membership and so on. How would you explain that? Thank you. I've got this, yeah. Somebody should have the microphone there now. Yes, given today's theme and Professor Chomsky's association with MIT, I wonder if he has any thoughts about the suicide of Aaron Schwartz. Ah, OK. Can you, for people who are here, just give us in a sentence what the Aaron Schwartz story is, because I'd rather you summarise it than I do. Access to information. Just say in a sense who he was and what happened? Aaron Schwartz was an information activist in the United States who was targeted by the United States government for downloading excessively on MIT's campus journals from JSTOR. And what happened to him? He killed himself. Thank you. So I wanted you to tell the story. That's it, rather than me. OK, and? This is a question of two parts. It was discussed how the media has massively narrowed in breadth between the 19th century and the present. Do you see this as part of a wider trend of reduced political innovation as a result of corporate propaganda and then part two is, if so, how is it possible to subvert this trend? OK, good. And since we may well be our last little go round, we'll squeeze in a couple more and I'll try and sort of bunch them together. So the gentleman there has got his hand up. We've managed to get through the whole evening not talking about the Middle East. Could we have a quick pricey? See? We were doing so well as well. Go on, there we are. You dismiss the internet as a forum. How does a disempowered individual counterbalance the onslaught of mainstream propaganda? Thank you. And last one from here, yeah. Talking about, well, I mean nowadays, for example, we don't have the helmet to deal with this dissidents. But I wonder if you could give us a contemporary example of how, for example, with the use of propaganda, dissidents get silence. Get silence, yeah, with the use of propaganda. Rather than of having in fact that. Perhaps a personal example. Yeah. OK, well, let's see if we can... I can think there's a couple there that pulled together, well, the question that came in at two parts was talking about the second part of it was how is it possible to get round this narrowing that happens with the corporate influence over the media, etc. And there was a similarity one saying, if you are not that impressed by the internet, what then can an individual do to somehow circumvent to get round this trend that you've been describing? So I'm putting those two questions together. First of all, I'm impressed by the internet. Actually, I was... It was developed in the lab where I was working in the 1950s and 60s. I remember that most of the high-tech culture comes out of the state sector. We don't have a capitalist system. We have a state sector, which is dynamic. That's where the creative, inventive work goes on. The whole IT revolution, including the internet and computers and the rest of it, most of it was developed in the state sector, places like MIT. In fact, the very building lab where I was working in the 50s and 60s. That's where the serious work was done. 30 years later, roughly, it was handed over to private enterprise so that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs could become rich, adapting the work that had been done to commercial uses. That's what we call capitalism, one of the many respects. I appreciate it. I think it's very good. In fact, I had personal appreciation. I had a brother who lived in Nicaragua during the Sandinista period. The United States was basically a war with Nicaragua. There was no way to communicate, no mail service, nothing. However, there was the predecessor of the internet, the ARPANET, which was a military system. I'm on it. Of course I'm at MIT, so I'm on it. She managed to get on it. Thanks to the Pentagon, we were able to communicate during the US war against Nicaragua. I like that. But I use it all the time. I look things up, I find things. What can we do? It's better than libraries. If you know what you're looking for, worse if you don't know. That's fine. If we want to do the hard work, you can find access to all sorts of things. In the United States, substantially in England, to a lesser extent, the country is free enough so that you have access, a very rich access to internal records. That's invaluable. A lot of what I've just been saying comes out of internal records. What about urging people to use non-corporate-owned media? Representative of the BBC over there, the Guardian has an unusual and non-conventional corporate structure. Would you say that some of those are ways to get... It's useful. I read The Guardian, I read The Independent, but the fact of the matter is that if I had one newspaper, I was stuck with one newspaper, I'd read The New York Times because the coverage is so much broader and deeper. When I come to England, I have to buy five newspapers every morning, and you put them together, you get a lot of things and a lot of junk. I'm an immense amount of junk. But a lot of interesting things. But you stayed with The New York Times even though your book is so critical of The New York Times, damning of The New York Times. But as I said, it's a selective criticism. What reporters report is usually quite accurate, even though it's distorted in many ways. First of all, what they don't report, which is just being part of an intellectual community that is so subservient to power, you can't look at it, and editorial discretion and other things. But it's a very good source every morning. The business press is very accurate and very reliable. The Wall Street, The Financial Times, is, I think, a very good newspaper. The Wall Street Journal with American counterpart is so right-wing that when you read the editorials, you don't know whether they'll laugh or cry. On the other hand, the news reporting is quite good and often exposes a corporate crime and things like that. I think the reason is that, and that's generally true of the business press, business week and others, a couple of differences between the business press and the general press. For one thing, the business press trusts its audience. Another thing is its audience are the guys who run the world. They better have a pretty fair picture of what's actually going on in the world. There's a lot of other ways to do things. We're not short of information. We're going to try and have to do this as short as we can, because we've got so little time. I'll take to explain decline in party membership and in voter turnout in democratic countries around the world. Those have marked trend in that direction. What's your interpretation? It's a very striking trend. Incidentally, I think it's a reflection of the fact that democracy is collapsing so people don't bother participating. Take the United States, where it's been closely studied. I don't know if it's studied that much here, but one of the main topics in professional political science is studying attitudes. You can do it very well in the United States. There's extensive polls. A lot of them are pretty accurate and well constructed. You find out a lot about attitudes. You can then look at policy, because that's right in front of your eyes, and you can compare attitudes and policy. Furthermore, a lot of the polls are stratified, so you learn what the rich want and what the poor want. When you put all this material together, I won't go through the details, it turns out an effect that about 70% of the population is almost totally disenfranchised. It doesn't matter what they think. The political class pays no attention to them. So no wonder they're not taking part? Why bother going to the voting booth? As you move up the income scale, you get more and more influence that top essentially get everything you want. You can see it in the big issues right at this moment. Let's take a look at American domestic politics. The big issue is the deficit. The sequester is practically closing down the government. We got to do something about the deficit. Who cares about the deficit? Not the population. Population doesn't think the deficit is a big issue. They think the big issue is lack of jobs. Not the business press. The business press thinks the deficit isn't a big problem. We should stimulate the economy, which you do with a bigger deficit. So it should be bigger, not smaller. The people that don't like the deficit are the wealthy and the banks, the financial institutions. Over the past 40 years, the financial institutions are mostly a drain on the economy, I think. They have become so powerful that they very largely dominate what goes on in the political system. If you look at, there just came a study by two good political scientists looking at comparing wealth with attitude toward the deficit in a very close correlation. The richer you are, the more you care about the deficit. The financial institutions care about it. So therefore that's the issue. It doesn't matter what the public wants. For reasons like this, you can see it in polls. When people are asked in polls in the United States, does Congress represent the population? The figures run single digits, maybe 10%. So people have no faith in it. It doesn't have anything to do with us. In fact, one very dramatic illustration which nobody ever talks about, is attitude toward taxes. In the United States on April 15, you pay your taxes. In a functioning democratic society, that would be a day of celebration. We're getting together to fund the projects that we decided on. In the United States, it's a day of mourning. And alien forces descending on us steal our money. It has nothing to do with us. In fact, attitude towards taxes is a pretty good index of the extent to which a democracy is functioning. And you can look at it and see yourself. So I think it's reasonable and natural for people to stop participating. I'm going to put together two other questions. Somebody asked, can you give an example of a sort of dissenter who is pushed aside by the system? And the example of Aaron Schwartz and your own university in MIT. It doesn't have to be a long answer on this one because we've got two more things I want to get in. Do you have a response on that? Well, it's not... I mean, the number of dissenters are pushed aside. It's almost universal. Either they're in jail or if it's Latin America, they get their heads blown off. In the United States, they're marginalised in various ways. Free country. It can't do in the United States what was done to L.M. in England. It's not that repressive society. And there's more protection for freedom of speech. But they're essentially... they can't get jobs, they're marginalised, vilified, all sorts of things. Not much punishment, frankly. But it's real. Aaron Schwartz has a different case and a very interesting one. I don't know if it was reported here, but Aaron Schwartz was a very bright young kid hacker, did very interesting work on computers. He was part of the hacking community, which is in favour of opening up all sorts of sources. And the way he went about it was he broke into the MIT computer system and what they call liberated J-Store. J-Store, for those of you who know, is a... It takes articles and professional journals and libraries or individuals that can do it, subscribe to it, and then you can get internet access to articles coming out in journals. So Aaron, he's a very nice kid. He committed suicide. What happened is, he broke into the MIT system, and he freed up J-Store. J-Store called for pressed MIT to do something about him. He was stealing their stuff. So they called the police. They didn't know who it was. They identified him. Then the federal prosecutor got involved into the state prosecutor and proposed a ridiculous sentence. Should have been a misdemeanor or something. But she said, I'm going to go to jail for 40 years or so. He committed suicide. Actually there was a plea bargain offered that he should agree to a jail sentence for a couple of months. But the family didn't want that. They committed suicide. It's... It's a terrible event. I mean, everyone involved should have pressed the prosecutors not to do anything. There is another issue which ought to be thought about and has to do with freedom of information. If you take J-Store and make it public, J-Store goes out of business. We live in a capitalist society. They can't survive if they don't get subscriptions. If J-Store goes out of business, nobody has access to the journals. So the next step is, okay, let's liberate the journals. The journals go out of business and nobody is anywhere to publish. That's... You can't just liberate things, pretending you don't exist in the world. A lot of young kids think you can do that. They're not thinking it through. Well, there are ways around this. But the ways around it involve collective action of the kind that doesn't fit with the new spirit of the age. What ought to happen is that there ought to be a public subsidy for creative work. Okay, then there wouldn't be any copyrights. There wouldn't be patents. A huge saving, incredible savings. And everything would be open. But that requires doing something together. And we're not allowed to do that. We have to be out for ourselves, you know. The very last thing is I'm going to give you a choice since we've been talking about freedom partly. You can either take the question about anarcho-syndicalism and where it might pop up in the world. You have described yourself in some places as an anarchist or with anarchist leanings. So where might it come? Or you can give us a praise of your views on the Middle East when we are already nine minutes over time. So the choice is entirely yours. Well, the question about anarchism I think is a simple inadequate but simple answer. If you take a look at what anarchism is meant over the centuries, it varies all over the place. It's a very broad range. But there's one theme that runs through it and I think it's an important one and I think recognizing it everyone ought to be an anarchist. The theme is that hierarchy, domination, control are not self-justifying. They require a justification and that's true whether it's a patriarchal family or international society or anything in between. Now if they can't give the justice the burden of proof is on those who exercise authority. If they can't give a justification which is almost always then the system ought to be dismantled. In my view that's anarchism then has a lot of variance and I think it's a very powerful notion. A lot more to say about it of course. On the Middle East it depends what you're talking about. If you take a look at it for simplicity let's take US politics most important country in the world. If you look at the presidential debate on foreign policy or you look at the Chicago hearing on defence there were two names that came up far more than anything else in the world. Israel and Iran. Other countries were kind of mentioned but marginally. Israel because both candidates had to show that they sort of vied for who loved it and worshipped it more. Iran because it's the gravest threat to world peace so those are the two that were discussed. Interesting question is there are a lot of questions about what the US-Israel relationship is that would be too long to discuss. One is quite interesting very interesting and what's particularly interesting is not getting reported. In the United States I've checked not at all you can tell me whether it's reported here. Let's say Iran's the greatest threat to world peace it could argue about it but let's assume that it's true. What's the threat? The threat is that they might be developing a nuclear capability which plenty of countries have. Okay so let's say that's not weapons but capability. So what do you do, let's grant that it's a threat. I might mention incidentally that that's a western obsession. Outside of the United States England and a couple of European countries it's not regarded as much of a threat. Non-aligned countries don't think so the Arab world doesn't think so it's a western obsession but let's accept it since we're here. What do you do about the threat? Well there's a number of possibilities. There's some technical proposals that could be pursued. One of them in fact was implemented until it was blocked by the west. In May 2010 Turkey and Brazil made a deal with Iran in which Iran would ship its low enriched uranium for storage to Turkey and in return the nuclear powers would provide Iran with the isotopes that it needs for its medical reactor. I would end the alleged threat. What happened when they reached the deal? As soon as they made the deal and ended the greatest threat to world peace the Obama administration and the media trailing behind as always bitterly condemned Turkey and Brazil for breaking ranks and Obama went off to the UN and tried to get harsher sanctions. Well the Brazilian Foreign Minister was a bit annoyed with this and he released a letter in which it from Obama to President Lula, the President of Brazil in which Obama had proposed this probably assuming that Iran would reject it win some propaganda points then Iran accepted it say you kill it Was that a story here? I don't think it was reported the way you just described it. That's what happened. It's not in doubt. There's something much more interesting. There's a much broader approach to the question move to establish a nuclear weapons free zone in the region. There's overwhelming international support for that an online movement, the Arab states, Egypt's been pressing it hard for 20 years. There's so much international support that the Obama administration's predecessors have been compelled to give kind of verbal assent. It would be a nice idea but not now and don't bother us. It's possible to implement the last December there was supposed to be an international conference in Finland under UN auspices to carry this idea forward. Iran agreed to attend in early November within days Obama cancelled the conference. Well, there's more but I'll stop there. This ought to be front page headlines in the United States not a word here probably the same. This is not a case of reporters distorting the facts it's reporters being so obedient as part of the intellectual culture like other intellectuals don't report it either so subservient to state corporate power that you just don't report things like that you don't look even and of course we know the reason the basic reason is the United States does not want to allow Israel's hundreds of nuclear weapons to be either inspected or being discussed. Well, okay, that's a serious question I might say that U.S. strategic analysts many of them disagree so the former head of the strategic command which controls nuclear weapons policies has headed developed one of the founders of the whole deterrence theory and so on he said he said it is dangerous and extremely extreme in the cauldron of animosities that we call them at least for one country meaning Israel to have hundreds of nuclear weapons which encourages others to develop them well that's pretty important try to find that I've quoted a couple other people but he's correct it is dangerous and extreme but that doesn't fit paradigm so it's not discussed and as I said before I don't think that our institutional analysis really accounts for this because it's over the whole intellectual community and the institutional analysis doesn't apply there I'm glad to hear it's not just journalists who are in your sites but it's a larger and deeper problem you've explored it and expanded it with such clarity the people here will probably have stayed for another hour and a half to hear more of you the exhibition propaganda power and persuasion opens here at the British Library 17th of May and runs till the 17th of September it only remains for all of you to join me in thanking Professor Nern Cholster