 Good evening. My name is Paul Whebly. I'm the director and principal of SOAS. It's a real privilege to welcome you all tonight. Whether you're here in the Logan Hall, watching on the web in the Jeffrey Hall or in the Students' Union to this globalization lecture given by an intellectual and moral giant of our world, Professor Noam Chonski. It's great to see such a large and mixed audience of students, staff and a huge number of members of the general public ac yn ymdwyng arferwain, mae'n gweithio'n cyffredig i'w ai syniadau. A'r bydd yw, sefydli'r leiswyr maen nhw wedi'i gweithio ar ei ddweud. Yn ymdweud yw Professor Jomski ac ymdweud yw'r leiswyr ymdweud yn eistedd i'r Logan Hall. Fy llwydd ymdweud yn neud yn cael ei bod yn rhan iawn i'r byd. Rwy'n cael ei bod yn rhan iawn i'r byd yn cael ei bod. Fy llwedd ar ymdweud yn cael ei bod yn rhan iawn i'r byd. Yn gwneud hynny'r ysgrifennu, ar hyn i ddweud yw yw'r cyfnod ar hyn o'r 3 yma, mae yw ddechrau yn ystod yn y cyffredin iawn y gallwn gwneud y Lohbwynhwrn. Rwy'n ystod y gallu'r gweithio'r cyfan. Y rhai'r ystyried ymlaenau i'r cyfnod yw'r syniadau yn y cyfnod ar y sgwrdd a'r Ystod yma, yn ddwy'r ystod yn ystod yw'r cyfnod i'r maen nhw. Dwi'n sgwrdd yw'r amser yn gweithio'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod. Felly, agre angen disio y gwaith yma, ac mae hi yw'r gweithio? Mae'n gweithio eich gweithio a'n gweithio, mae'n dweud gallai'n gweithio i'r amser i gael ein SQ yng nghymru. Mae'n dweud eich gweithio i'n gweithio. Mae wedi gweithio ac mae'r Dálin Niswg Ffwylwyd, er fyddai'r Cwmwyllai Gwyllus Ciralthenau Syaen, ac mae'r gyfarwydd yma. Mae wedi gweithio addr mör. Mae'r gwirionedd hyn yn gweithio i gael ei ddweud, ..wysig i wneud y bwysigol y byddai gweithio arall. Felly dyna'r ddechrau. Rhaid i'n fwyfyrdd i'r Siolbeyr, i'r ffordd i gael i'r llei. Rydyn ni'n fawr i'r ffanc? Felly y profesor Chomsgai ond rwy'r llei'r llei'r llwyffyddau. Felly y ddechrau i'r Cyngorau, i'r llwyffyddau... ..yna'r ffawr i'r llei'r llei. Felly yma'r gweithio, muniol, ychydig i'r gwneud hynny.. I will also contribute, I know, during the question and answer session to making this a really great event. Now I'm looking for where I'm going to sit somewhere down there. I have over to you Gilbert. Thank you Paul. Well, good evening and... Well I'm, my name is Gilbert Ashkar and the Professor and Department of Development Studies here at SOAS and the convener of the Globalization Lectures series of which this evening, this evening's lecture is the first for this academic year which is the third year for the series. As Paul just said, I mean this evening is obviously a very special occasion indeed, very outstanding event and of course this is the reason why we knew from the start that the 300 seat lecture theatre that we have at SOAS would not be enough but I must say that judging from the huge overflow of seat requests that we have received and kept receiving until the very last moment we could easily have filled the, I don't know, the Royal Albert Hall or anything like that and without any advertisement in the mass media, just the SOAS website. So that's because our guest this evening is indeed, I would say, the living intellectual whose fame is the closest to that of a music or movie star and it's our great honour this evening and my great pleasure as a personal friend to welcome of course our most distinguished guest, Professor Noam Shomsky. I think that Noam Shomsky's reputation is such that he does certainly not need to be presented and I would say the very size of this audience indicates that but therefore limit myself to a brief comment by way of formal introduction. I'd say that, well, I guess most people know that, but Professor Shomsky's towering scientific achievement, the one for which you will find him listed among the key contributors to the history of human knowledge even on panels in public places as I have seen more than once, is of course his revolutionary contribution to linguistics, a contribution that had far-reaching consequences well beyond the field of linguistics itself, into psychology and even biology and other fields. This is however a relatively esoteric Noam Shomsky and the aspect of his work that like every specialized scientific knowledge is only accessible when you know the premises and of course this is not the Noam Shomsky that you came to listen to this evening you came for the other Noam Shomsky whose reputation is even wider, larger than the first. Noam Shomsky as the foremost intellectual critic of the US government's wars and its foreign policy in general as well as the foremost critic of the prevailing world social and political order. Noam Shomsky in a word as the quintessential one could say public intellectual. The power of Shomsky's critique resides in its combination of an impressively broad counter examination of the facts with a sharp ethical standpoint exposing tirelessly the Machiavellism of the powers that be. This is the Noam Shomsky to whom we will listen this evening, analysing for us the global crisis in the plural and what has been called the unipolar moment starting from the time when the other pole of global power, the Soviet Union, that is collapsed in the early 90s. Let me add just a final preliminary remark. Anyone who watches or hears a public lecture by Noam Shomsky for the first time is surprised by the exceptionally low key tone and the low sound volume of his speeches, better suited to small audiences. So it comes as a great surprise indeed to anyone expecting you know one of those seasoned public speakers who know the ropes of the oratory art, know how to use them. Well Noam Shomsky is very different. He addresses not the sentiments of his listeners but their intelligence and this in addition to some recent vocal problems that Professor Shomsky has been suffering from means that in such a large room we require from you a special attention to help us keep full silence starting from switching off your mobile phones. Please if you didn't think of it, do it now. At the end of the lecture and according to the time that will be left, we shall take a few questions to our guests from the audience. Only a little few I'm afraid. It will depend on time but in any case it will be just a little few questions and followed by his reply of course the meeting will end at 8.30. Finally let me express special thanks to Paul Eric Christiansen and to Katie Nugent and her team whose contribution to the organization of this event was essential as well as to all other staff members and students who helped us organize this this event. To all thank you very much and well I give now the floor to my colleague Dr Dan Plett who's the academic director of the Center for International Studies and Diplomasty who is co-sponsoring this event with my own department of development studies. Thank you all. Thank you very much. I also would like to thank all of our helpers for putting this evening together. I just want to make two points, one about history and one about radicalism and moderation. SOAS was founded in 1916 at the height of the First World War and of the British Empire and at that time I would guess that the vast majority of people in this room tonight would never have been admitted to SOAS even in a menial capacity. It is some testament to the progress in some areas that we have seen since then that we have such an audience here tonight. But we should not and I think in any way be complacent. We can look back at previous eras as we often do in history at SOAS, medieval Andrew Leesir, other eras of tolerance and moderation and see how they were swept away by violence and barbarism. We are only here tonight because of the effort and struggle of our forebears and if our descendants are to be here it will only be because of the relentless and tireless effort that we put in to preserve and build on what brought us here this evening. And the second point I want to make is about radicalism and moderation. In reading Professor Chomsky's work on politics I've never really been struck by them as radical works but as moderate works. After all it's moderate to want peace, it's moderate to want equality and it's moderate to want international law. So I hope you'll join with me in welcoming a radical but also a great moderate and voice for common sense international politics. Professor Chomsky. Start by saying a few words about the title. A serious discussion of crises is far beyond the range of talk. They're too many, they're too severe. What I'll try to do is mention a few of them and some of their what seemed to me their salient characteristics and then try to relate them to the famous unipolar moment which has been the topic of a great deal of scholarly and popular discussion since the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago leaving the United States as the sole global superpower instead of merely the primary superpower as before and is now of course very much in the center of attention with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall coming up in a few days. A sensible way to approach these topics I think is maybe to just focus on the guiding principles of policy formation since World War II. When these are understood it's often fairly straightforward to apply them to ongoing developments. That's particularly true in countries with societies with stable institutions like the US so that the guidelines for policy remain pretty stable as well. Well I'm going to focus on the United States for two reasons. The first is I know more about it. The second is that it's as close to a global sovereign as the world has ever known and has been so since World War II was a fact that was well understood by US planners during World War II as they developed quite explicit doctrines that still pretty much prevail. That background I think provides the context for understanding both the unipolar moment and current policies which keep pretty much to the norm and the institutional changes which have taken place particularly since the 1970s I think provide the right context for understanding many of the current crisis. Well from the outbreak of war in 1939 high level US planners, state and private met to deal with the outcome of the war, probable outcome of the war. They recognize that whatever the outcome the US would emerge as the dominant global power displacing Britain and accordingly they developed plans for the United States to exercise control over a substantial portion of the globe what they called the grand area. This grand area was to comprise at the very least the western hemisphere the former British Empire the far east and western Asia's energy resources and in this grand area to quote quoting now the US would hold unquestioned power with military and economic supremacy and would act to ensure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by states that interfere with its global designs. Notice that this is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration the most progressive in American history and if you detect a certain similarity to the Bush doctrine that's so outraged articulate opinion it's not accidental. Review of the intervening period reveals that the same conceptions prevailed throughout and still do just to take one illustration Bush's immediate predecessor Bill Clinton who's regarded as a centrist moderate pretty much Obama's model under Clinton the US officially reserved the right and quoting again to act unilaterally when necessary including unilateral use of military power to defend such vital interests as ensuring uninhibited access to key markets energy supplies and strategic resources. This is without even the pretexts of self-defense on which the Bush neocons insisted. The Clinton doctrine elicited no condemnation barely any comment unlike the arrogant and contemptuous proclamations of the neocons and rightly because it just reiterated long-standing positions and it was presented with polite restraint. In the early days of World War II planners thought that Germany might prevail in Europe but as Russia began to grind down the Wehrmacht the vision of the grand area became more expansive it was to incorporate as much of Eurasia as possible at least Western Europe economic heartland. That required dedicated efforts in which Britain participated to undermine the anti-fascist resistance and to restore the traditional order. These are important topics to take us too far afield. Detailed plans were developed for world order. Each region assigned what George Kennan's policy planning staff in the State Department what they called its function. Southeast Asia for example was to fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials for Japan and Western Europe. The south in general was assigned a service role to provide resources cheap labor markets investment opportunities and later on other services such as export of pollution and waste. At that time the United States was not much interested in Africa so it was handed over to Europe to exploit it's the word Kennan used to exploit for its reconstruction for more time destruction. One might imagine different relations between Europe and Africa in the light of history but there's no evidence that these were ever considered. In recent years the United States has become much more committed to incorporating Africa within the expanding and deepening grand area and reflecting these commitments two years ago President Bush and defense secretary Robert Gates who as you know holds the same position under Obama established the Africa command which is integrated with other regional commands that were established during Reagan's militarization of global policy spanning the globe. That system is just very recently been extended to the southern command which covers Latin America. The command existed it's now been extended. That's clearly a reaction to very significant moves in Latin America towards integration and independence for the first time really since the European conquests and these developments threaten traditional US power interests controlling Latin America is the oldest US foreign policy issue apart from conquest of the national territory and virtual extermination of the indigenous population. In 1971 as Washington was planning the overthrow of Chilean democracy, Nixon's national security council observed that if the United States cannot control Latin America it cannot expect to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world meaning to control the world. Today with Latin America's moves towards independence the problem arises sharply again. One effect of these moves is that the United States has been expelled from all of its South American military bases a few weeks ago the last one in Ecuador. The US in reaction is now establishing seven new bases in Colombia it's one ally and just recently two more in Panama which tends to be more obedient. These recent moves have aroused concern in South America intensified by the plans for the Colombian bases last April the US Air Mobility Command branch of the Air Force proposed that the Palancaro base in Colombia could become what's called a cooperative security location that would allow coverage of nearly half the continent by US military aircraft. US fourth fleet which had been disbanded in 1950 was reactivated last year that covers Caribbean and Central and South American waters and there's a much more general policy of militarization of South America that's underway. Well returning to World War II planning unlike Africa Middle East oil reserves were understood to be quoting here a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history the most strategically important area in the world and Eisenhower's words. The control of Middle East oil would provide the United States with substantial control of the world in the words of the influential planner a burly prominent figure in Roosevelt and later liberal administrations. So accordingly Eisenhower's National Security Council explained that there's a perception in the Arab world that the United States supports harsh and brutal regimes and blocks democracy and development to ensure control over Middle East oil. They recognize that the perception is essentially accurate and urge that that's what we should be doing. These policies elicit a campaign of hatred against us among the population president Eisenhower observed 1958 that's 50 years before George W Bush plaintively asked why do they hate us deciding it must be because they hate our freedom. The U.S. itself did not rely then on Middle East oil rather Eisenhower policy of Democrats in the 60s was aimed at exhausting domestic reserves the reason was short term profit for Texas producers but nevertheless control of Middle East oil was understood to be essential for world control in particular defend off the frightening possibility that Europe the only potential competitor might one day adopt an independent path and that remains a very live policy concern get back to it. The underlying principles of policy formation as I mentioned remain pretty stable with their global reach so we find the same policies enacted in different parts of the world. For example in the early 1950s the National Security Council considered the problems that Washington faced in Latin America and Southeast Asia which were quite similar and called for similar remedies. In Latin America I'm mostly quoting internal documents now. In Latin America U.S. interests were threatened by radical and nationalistic regimes that are responsive to popular pressures for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses and development for domestic needs and these tendencies conflict with the need for a political and economic climate conducive to private investment and the need for protection of our raw materials ours though they have to be somewhere else by accident. Latin Americans believe that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country's resources should be the people of that country which is obviously irrational since the first beneficiaries must be U.S. investors. Latin America is supposed to keep to its service function it's supposed to refrain from what the Eisenhower and Truman administrations called excessive industrial development which infringes on U.S. interests. The U.S. therefore imposed an economic charter for the Americas which was designed to eliminate economic nationalism in all its forms. There was however an unstated exception economic nationalism remained a crucial feature of the U.S. economy which relied far more even than in the past on a dynamic state sector it's the root of the contemporary high tech economy often operating under the cover of defense. Well in the early 50s the immediate concern in Latin America was Guatemalan democracy that had to go turning the country into a horror chamber from which it has yet to escape. A fundamental problem illustrated by Guatemala has always been that successful independent development even in the tiniest corner of the world might be a model that others would try to follow. It might be a virus that could spread contagion to borrow Kissinger's phrasing of the standard doctrine in this case discussing the imperative of destroying Chilean democracy. Well the same conception applied in Southeast Asia at the same time early 50s it's when the United States turned towards direct support for France's effort to reconquer its former Vietnamese colony the concern then was primarily Japan that Japan was not Guatemala it was a really important dependency and top civil and military planners recognized that Japan could be controlled only if it were assured access to her historic markets and the sources of food and raw materials in Southeast Asia. The loss of Southeast Asia to the western world would almost inevitably force Japan into an accommodation with the communist controlled areas in Asia that would in effect re-establish the new order that Japan had attempted to create by conquest and in 1950 the United States was not prepared to lose the pacific phase of World War II which was substantially fought to present this outcome. Planners feared in fact that Japanese accommodation with communist controlled areas of Asia would have dangerous repercussions as far as the Middle East and Western Europe and a lot was at stake and the loss of even a single Southeast Asian country was therefore intolerable because of the virus effect of successful independent development. Well to prevent contagion by a virus it's necessary to destroy the virus and inoculate potential victims and that's exactly what the United States did in Latin America and Southeast Asia time after time viruses have been destroyed and the region around them inoculated by installation of vicious dictators. In Indochina the destruction of the virus was so extreme that by 1967 the respected and quite hawkish military and Vietnam expert Bernard Fall warned that Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity is threatened with extinction as the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size. The attack became even more savage later extended to Laos and Cambodia. One of the cruelest crimes I think of modern history was the discussion of the destruction of the primitive peasant society of northern Laos which was soon surpassed by the bombing of rural Cambodia. It was known that the bombing was pretty bad but documents that were released a decade ago were studied by two leading Cambodia scholars Owen Taylor and Ben Kearnan. They found that the bombing was five times as high as the horrendous level that had already been reported substantially greater than all allied bombing in all theaters in World War II and that the civilian casualties and their words drove and enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support before the bombing began setting in motion all the horrors that followed including the monstrous Khmer Rouge crimes in accord with usual practice their study was ignored. It's commonly claimed that the United States lost the war in Indochina it's virtually a cliche but it's not accurate. It's not easy for a superpower to lose a war against a minor adversary. In reality the major U.S. war aims were achieved. The virus was destroyed and the region was inoculated from contagion as murderous dictators were installed throughout the region. The most important of course was Indonesia that was protected from contagion in 1965 when the Suharto coup slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people mostly landless peasants and destroyed the only mass-based political organization. In retrospect McGeorge Bundy national security adviser for Kennedy and Johnson he reflected that the U.S. should have ended the war in 1965 since its major goals had been achieved. The virus was virtually destroyed region inoculated. The Suharto coup and the massacres were quite frankly and openly described and applauded with unrestrained euphoria. So in the New York Times for example the editors discussed what they called the staggering mass slaughter while their prominent liberal columnist James Reston greeted it as in his words a gleam of light in Asia. The editors praised the Indonesian moderates who took over slaughtered the population and opened the country to western plunder. Where the matter has been studied only a few countries other western powers reacted the same way. I don't think it's been studied in England but I wouldn't be surprised if the same will be true. Suharto continued to be our kind of guy as the Clinton administration described him while compiling one of the world's most hideous human rights records and also carrying out near genocide and conquered East Timor always with decisive U.S. U.K. support that continued right through 1999 to the accompaniment of a remarkable chorus of self-congratulation among western intellectuals who were quite dazzled by their own nobility in denouncing the crime of others. The prevailing principles I think could accurately be called the mafia doctrine. The godfather does not tolerate disobedience. It's too dangerous if some small storekeeper refuses to pay protection money. The godfather who may not care about the money doesn't just send the goons to get the money it sends the goons to beat them to a pulp so everybody else understands that it's not a model that you can follow and that's a leading principle of international affairs not sufficiently remarked they think. The mafia principle is so powerful that it even overrides fundamental principles of policy formation. Typically policy formation responds to the interests of the business world but not in this case sometimes. An instructive example of this is Cuba. Cuba was the target of major terrorist war reached its peak under Kennedy but continued and truly savaged economic strangulation which goes on until today. The details really have to be read to appreciate it and the reason was quite explicit in the internal record back in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Cuba was carrying out what they called successful defiance of U.S. policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine and no Russians but successful defiance. Arthur Schlesinger who was Kennedy's one of his Latin American specialists wrote to summarize the study of Kennedy team on Latin America by saying that the problem with Cuba is the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands. That's dangerous it's a model that others who are suffering similar repression might want to follow. Those are good reasons for massive terror and economic strangulation at a savage level. Polls have been taken for the last several decades on normalization of relations with Cuba. Public substantially agrees. Considerable majorities which is kind of interesting because it's never an option discussed but they're dismissed but that's normal. The population is routinely dismissed. More interesting is that powerful business interests are in favor of normalization agribusiness pharmaceuticals energy institutions. They're usually attended to but not in this case the mafia principle prevails. Iran today is somewhat similar in 1979. There was successful defiance in Iran that was intolerable. The U.S. continued without a break its torture of Iranians going back to 1953 when as you know the U.S. and Britain overthrew the parliamentary government and stole the harsh tyranny. The goal in 1953 was to maintain control of Iran's resources but the concerns were more general as usual. Actually they were well described right at the time by editors of the New York Times who wrote that the the coup the result of the coup underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism. This lesson may strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders who will have a clear-eyed understanding of the principles of decent behavior and will not be seduced by the berserk concept that the first beneficiaries of a country's resources should be the people of that country. So the Iranian virus of the early 50s couldn't spread contagion. However in 1979 the virus emerged again. The U.S. at first sought to sponsor a military coup when that failed. It turned to support for Saddam Hussein's merciless invasion. The Reaganites denied his most monstrous crimes Al-Anfal and Qalabja. They finally entered the war directly leading Iran to capitulate which I presume is very likely that that's what lies behind the scandal about Pan Am 103 which is in the news recently. I might have had that the cold war itself was has been perceived in these terms reflecting the mafia doctrine. Perhaps the most prominent eminent scholar of cold war scholar is John Lewis Gattis of Yale. He dates the onset of the cold war to 1917 and explains that the western intervention in 1918 was defensive because it was in respawn quoting and now is in response to a profound and potentially far reaching intervention by the new Soviet government in the affairs not only of the west but virtually every country in the world. The revolution's challenge to the very survival of the capitalist system. So everything else has been defensive. This often reaches near psychotic dimensions. No time to discuss but they're interesting. Going back to Iran the Reaganite love affair with Saddam did not end after the war. In 1989 Iraqi nuclear engineers were invited to the United States. It was then George Bush the first to receive advanced weapons training in nuclear weapons. Bush also sent a high level senatorial delegation headed by Robert Dole a couple of years later the republican presidential candidate. His mission was to convey the president's good wishes to his friend Saddam and to assure him that he could disregard the critical comments he hears now and then from American journalists. We have this free press thing in the United States. Can't really shut him up. Well a couple of months later in August 1990 Saddam defied or more likely misunderstood orders and he quickly shifted from a favored friend to reincarnation of Hitler. Meanwhile the torture of Iran continued without a break and still does harsh sanctions other means and as in the case of Cuba powerful business interests apparently agree with the American public that the US should move towards normalization of relations with Iran. So I presume that we don't have documents I presume that the energy corporations would be delighted to gain access to Iran's rich resources but the mafia principle prevails. Well there's actually quite a lot to say about this but I'll put it off until Thursday when I'll be talking here about the Middle East. On Iran's border in Afghanistan and of course also Pakistan. Afpak is now called. Obama has escalated Bush's war and is likely to proceed on that course perhaps sharply. He's also made it clear that the US intends to retain a long term presence in the region. That much is signaled by the huge city within a city that's called the Baghdad Embassy. It's unlike any embassy in the world. It's to be expanded under Obama. Currently it's budgeted at 1.5 billion a year. It's recently announced that that's to increase in the coming two years to 1.8 billion. Obama has also announced the construction of similar mega embassies in Islamabad and Kabul and also huge consulates in Peshawar and elsewhere. There's basically no significant change in the fundamental traditional conception that if we can control Middle East energy resources we can control the world. The obstacles are great but the project is by no means abandoned. Well let me finally turn to the immediate topic, the crises in the unipolar moment. I think they fall into place fairly readily if the context, the planning context is understood. The crises are numerous. Two of them are special. They literally involve species survival, the environmental crisis and nuclear weapons. In both cases tendencies are in the wrong direction with perhaps lethal consequences. On the environmental crisis I'll mention just one example which could turn out to be the most important story of the year. As you know in six weeks there'll be a conference in Copenhagen which may determine the fate of the world and which almost surely will fail. Last week a poll was released by the Pew Research Foundation on attitudes of Americans about global warming and what it revealed is a very sharp decline in concern in the past year. The numbers who believe that human activity is a factor declined to just over a third. Well that could be a virtual death sentence for the species because of the obvious significance of the U.S. role. This sharp decline can be traced very readily to a huge corporate run propaganda campaign downplaying or denying global warming and apart from the potentially grim consequences that raises interesting questions about policy. So why do business leaders want the public to reject what they know perfectly well to be true and ominous? Well the standard answer to this namely that short term profits outweigh long term considerations which is not false but it's incomplete. Why the choice? Well the choice results from a fundamental and well known inherent inefficiency of markets namely ignoring what are called externalities. In this case the externality is the fate of the species. The roots of the financial crisis are more or less the same. I'll return to that in a moment. The general conclusion is that markets may more or less work for a while but unless they're sharply constrained they almost necessarily lead to disaster and constraints are not likely when major media are basically adjuncts of business. The government is largely in its pocket and the general public is marginalized in one or another way hence susceptible to manipulation. Well the nuclear threat is also severe. Obama's rhetoric on the matter, I stress rhetoric, a single that was single out for praise when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. There are immediate actions that could be taken to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. One is establishment of nuclear weapons free zones. There are right now six of these. The most recent covers Africa and the associated islands but it faces challenges from the United States and Britain because of a dispute with Africa over the island of Diego Garcia. The population was brutally expelled by Britain so that the island could be used by the US and UK as a base for their military operations in western and central Asia and presumably as a storage site for nuclear weapons. Now the African Union objects strongly but Britain and they claim that it's part of Africa but Britain and the United States insist that it's to be excluded from the jurisdiction of the weapons free, nuclear weapons free zone and there are similar challenges facing the South Pacific nuclear weapons free zone. That went into effect formally in 1986 but it was delayed by France's insistence on nuclear weapons testing. By now only the United States has not ratified it and reasons are clear it would inhibit passage of US naval vessels carrying nuclear weapons and the storage of nuclear weapons on island dependencies which are also bases for US nuclear submarines. Well despite US and British obstructionism establishment of these zones can be a valuable step nowhere more than in the Middle East. In April 1991 the Security Council affirmed the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery resolution 687. Now that's a particularly firm commitment for the United States and Britain and in fact has very wide support including the majority of Americans. It's a firm commitment for the US and Britain because they appealed to it to try to provide a thin cover for their invasion of Iraq claiming that Iraq hadn't lived up to the terms of the 1991 agreement so yes they're very committed to this in principle. It would cover Iran, Israel and US forces there and with adequate verification which doesn't seem impossible it would mitigate and perhaps eliminate the current tensions over Iran which threaten to explode into a major war and the threats are significant come back to them Thursday but it's not on the agenda. Turning to other crises a few days ago there were a few weeks ago there were attempts which failed to bring two other major crises to public attention. One was on October 15th World Food Day when UN agencies announced that the number of people facing hunger past a billion and food aid had to be cut because rich countries were cutting back substantially on their meager promises. Two days later was October 17th was World Poverty Day Amnesty International tried to call attention to it. It declared that poverty is the world's worst human rights crisis for good reasons but for the centers of power these are not priorities it's far more important to bail out bankers. All of this illustrates two other crises one is a deep moral crisis in the crisis in the culture of the privileged and no less deep flaws in the functioning of western democracies. I think these are also illustrated by what is called the crisis in the west. When the term is used qualification it refers to the financial crisis. Now that crisis has deep roots it goes back to the financialization of the economy in the 1970s just to illustrate in the United States around 1970 financial institutions constituted maybe three percent of gross domestic product it's pushing a third right now the corresponding decline of productive economy shipped abroad so that was in the financialization of the economy one part of what's called neoliberalism also it corresponded to dedication to certain religious doctrines of efficient markets and rational expectations all of which magnified the well-known inefficiency of markets that I mentioned a lack of attention to externalities in this case systemic risk risk is underpriced and that's understood and to make it worse policymakers design perverse incentives to magnify it still further primary among them is the government insurance policy called too big to fail now getting worse after the bursting of the tech bubble of the of the late 90s then the housing bubble a couple years later fed chairman Alan Greenspan was criticized because he didn't follow through on his very brief warning about irrational exuberance but I think that's the wrong criticism it was perfectly rational exuberance when the government is there to bail you out it's a doctrine being followed with precision by obama and his advisors who are selected from the leading figures who were largely responsible for creating the current crisis and it's working very well the big financial institutions that were the immediate culprits are making out like bandits uh you can read it in the business press every day they're bigger than ever reporting great profits enjoying even bigger government insurance policy and therefore they're being encouraged to set the stage for the next and worse crisis and that's recognized but these are institutional decisions managers either play the game or somebody else replaces them who will well what about those who are too small to matter they suffer that includes the general population in the united states real wages have pretty much stagnated for the majority for about 30 years while benefits decline and those who are too small to matter now face huge unemployment and loss of their homes also suffering are the banks that serve the public they're going under while those that engage in risky investments and reap enormous profits are doing just fine thanks to the nanny state which they nourish well there's a great deal more to say about today's crisis but let me end with a comment on the unipolar moment uh it can be brief because if you keep the context of planning in mind everything pretty much follows actually we learned quite a lot about the nature of the cold war and about events following you know unfolding uh until the present by looking at how washington reacted to the disappearance of the global enemy uh the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy to take over the world as john f kennedy described it within months after the fall of the wall the bush one administration outlined washington's new course national security strategy and a budget upcoming budget in brief it said everything will remain the same but with new pretexts so we still need a huge military system but for a new reason quoting the technological sophistication of third world powers said without self ridicule ridicule from outside they also stated that we must maintain intervention forces directed at the middle east energy rich reasons adding that in these regions these significant threats to our interests could not be laid at the kremlin's door that contrary to decades of deceit all of this was passed over quietly barely even reported along with more like it but for those who hope to understand the world it's it's quite instructive well it was clear right away that some new pretext was going to be needed for intervention uh the alleged communist menace having lost its efficacy and uh intellectual elites quickly turned to the task and they soon declared what was called a normative revolution that granted the united states the right of humanitarian intervention as it chose for the noblest of reasons by definition uh the traditional victims were unimpressed to put it mildly high level conferences of the global south bitterly condemned what they called the so-called right of humanitarian intervention right quotes well clearly a refinement was necessary so the concept of responsibility to protect was devised in its place those who pay a little attention to history will not be surprised to discover that the western powers exercise their responsibility to protect in a highly selective manner in strict adherence to the stable guidelines of policy these facts are disturbingly obvious and they require considerable agility on the part of the intellectual classes it's another revealing story but i'll put it aside for now i'm going to return to it in a couple of days at lse another traditional another question that came to the fore as the unipolar moment dawn was the fate of nato well the traditional justification of nato of course was defense against russian aggression and with the soviet union gone that pretext evaporated with it well naive souls who have faith in public doctrine would have expected nato to disappear as well quite the contrary and nato was quickly expanded the details are interesting both about the cold war and about what's followed and more generally about how state policy is formed and implemented as the soviet union collapsed michael gorbachev made an astonishing concession he agreed to allow a unified germany to join a hostile military alliance run by the global superpower even though germany alone had almost destroyed russia twice in the century there was however a quid pro quo the bush administration promised gorbachev that nato would not extend to east germany a little on farther east and they also assured gorbachev that nato would be transforming itself into a more political organization quoting secretary of state james baker gorbachev also proposed a nuclear a nuclear free zone from the arctic to the Baltics to the black sea that would be a step towards what's called a zone of peace to remove any threat to europe east or west as far as i can determine that proposal was dismissed without consideration i'r prysyn a phobl a'r ffwrdd a'r hyn yn dweud hynny clinton yn ddechrau a washington's commitments quickly vanished there's no need to comment on the promise that nato would become a more political organization a clinton expanded nato to the east bush went beyond and obama apparently intends to carry the expansion forward his national security advisor former marine commandant james jones uh he has urged that nato should move to the south as well as the east so as to reinforce us control over middle east middle east energy supplies the traditional a traditional primary commitment jones also advocates a nato response force as he calls it which will give the us run military alliance much more flexible capability to do things rapidly at a very very long distances as today in afghanistan uh the nato secretary general yeah the chefer dutch he informed the nato conference uh that uh quoting him nato troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that's directed to the west and more generally they have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other crucial infrastructure of the energy system well that decision spells out more explicitly the post uh cold war policies of reshaping nato into a us run global intervention force with special concern for control over energy all quite familiar well as i mentioned from the earliest post world war days world war two days it was understood that western europe might choose to follow an independent course perhaps something like the gallest vision of europe from the atlantic to the urals now if this happened the problem would not be a virus that would spread contagion but a pandemic that would bring down the whole system of global control nato was partly intended to counter this serious threat the current nato expansion and the ambitious goals of the new nato carry these objectives further well what to say about all these things i've barely skim the surface of the topics that were announced uh hope we have a chance to pursue this more deeply in discussion thanks thank you very much known for this hugely impressive talk and i'm sure that many people room will would like to to put some questions to you when can can we go for 30 minutes of question and then you get 20 minutes something like that to wrap it up in or yes maximum uh okay so in order to to have the largest number possible of people among you speaking we'll be asking you please to make brief interventions put your question there's no real proper time for a discussion but more for questions so no statements but short questions no longer than three minutes let's say as a maximum if you please so i will try to designate recognize people at random in in the hall so just manifest yourself and we'll be we'll be starting okay yes uh one person here in the front row please thank you um when i was in shaman from ceasefire magazine um thank you for the very very inspiring talk my question is regarding afghanistan um last week president karazai of afghanistan um was forced to accept a runoff to the elections and i wanted to know whether what your analysis was in terms of why did that happen and what does it say about where things are heading in afghanistan in terms of uh karazai being forced to accept a runoff what what's your analysis if okay uh shall i repeat the question yeah it's can you repeat it briefly because he couldn't hear it's a matter of is this better the distance between your mouth and the the mic is probably at the stake here so try to yeah now is this better now i'll i'll repeat the question in a in a much more concise manner um last week president karazai of afghanistan was forced to accept a runoff to the elections because of the the massive fraud that took place uh what is your analysis in terms of why the the um the u.s. essentially forced karazai to accept this and does it say anything does it indicate a change of direction or is it just um what's your reading of this of this decision and what do you expect to happen hello i'm pratyw Shah i'm a student at the LSE my question is do you think the rise of China and an increasingly assertive Russia especially after the Putin years poses a threat to the america's unipola movement uh my question again is uh i once went to see a film which was uh Ken Loach film which was about uh began in Glasgow and ended up in Nicaragua uh and the Nicaragua part had subtitles which we didn't need but the Glasgow part didn't which we didn't need um good evening my question is regarding Pakistan um you know with the ongoing Taliban crisis in the northwestern frontier what radical mode of action does you know mr Chomsky expect from the obama administration in the times to come i'm tarana and i'm a development study students here my question is regarding Afghanistan again uh the reason for not supporting the Afghan national army do you think uh the the reason for that is to extend the NATO presence there and if yes for what reasons other than the border with Iran thank you the reasons for supporting the afghan army with the iranian border issues hello yes um my question has to do with Sri Lanka and the recently um concluded war there um in light of all the human humanitarian and human rights abuses by the government of Sri Lanka and the inability of the west um namely the EU and the US to influence that either at the UN human rights council or in calls for um better humanitarian access um how does he see that playing with the the role of china india um iran and pakistan's influence in that area as it's the 80% of china's oil comes from the middle east through past Sri Lanka thank you there have been several questions about popular crises so things like iran iraq afghanistan in other parts of the world there are of course crises that carry on without headlines without much publicity i'm thinking because of my own recent work of um western papua that's to say iran jaya and i wonder what you think are the future prospects there and the prospects for action both by citizens here and uh at a more governmental level thank you my name is memet hastan i'm a turkish journalist uh two weeks ago um turkish refused to um refused is that to take part in a military exercise and there was um um from israel um turkey received harsh criticism and threatening that um they would lobby um us for um and european union um in order to put more obstacles for turkish not to join the um EU i wonder how uh professor chomsky um see turkey response and turkey also just um said that um it was because the goldstone report that um the massacre uh taken place in gaza that that is the reason why um they refused um is glad to take part in military exercise thank you hi my name is guld davis am i holding the microphone at the right distance um my my question i'm not sure is of a line i i understand the premise that all these historic policies are about maintaining america's domination but i wondered on a more this is run by individuals and i would be interested on um your views on how the psychology works to be able to justify such objectively spoken heinous actions and i was more interested in how the system in terms of individuals in power works hi thanks um you mentioned in passing somewhere about the role of media in supporting the uh current hegemony and the us rise of power and so on um i participate in an organisation called indy media that operates throughout the world and i wondered what you thought about the role of citizen journalism and the rise of the internet and how that may influence future um events and occurrences in the political state thank you thank you hi good evening professor i have two questions for you uh the first is okay firstly i'm um disturbed by the u s africa command africom that you touched on which states that its goal is to deliver humanitarian aid diplomacy and development by way of military intervention on the ground and does the my question is does the current lawlessness in somalia serve the us interest and my next question could the global strategy and policy of the us which we see in the middle east africa and other parts of the world be in preparation for a shift in the base of the ruling power from the us to another part of the world since empires never last forever thanks bob rech university of brighton i think it will be fair to describe your conclusions as less than wholly optimistic and in light of that and this is a serious question what's to be done the role of iran in the middle east and how yes i'm inquiring about the role of iran in the middle east and how much it is supported by the usa and uh or against it and how much danger that should be uh spread over and what should be done about it thank you very much any more yes please uh yes here to the right yes the person to your right here hi uh first i just want to say thank you for mentioning uh what happened in my country a few years back uh because you mentioned that um incident in your book uh our government finally wait a second please yeah yeah my government finally acknowledged that event um as official uh it's south south korea and um there was a uh when the time of korean war there was certain uh civilians civilians were dead by um american troops and which was really which was hidden from the government uh i mean by the government then uh because of his work in the what what amer what uncle sam really wants he mentions and him i think he's the only major scholar that mentioned in the series of work and because of i think because of his um contribution uh the the finally the people who suffered from that incident was finally uh the event was accepted as an official i'm not sure whether i'm making sense or not but yeah as long as steven got it it's great and i uh and i have a question there so we'll take a couple more and your last chance um traditionally speaking um periods of multi polarity there's an argument to be made they brought instability and violence you talked about the deleterious effects of unipolarity but do you think that the the fall of unipolarity uh and american hegemony and the dispersion of power will bring more violence in the future thank you the person behind just behind has been raising his hand for a long time can you hear me oh yeah in light of the recent peer reviewed paper published in the open chemical physics journal which proves the presence of the military grade incendiary nano thermite in dust samples taken from ground zero as well as the growing number of architects and engineers supporting the controlled demolition hypothesis what are your views on the possibility of us establishment involvement in the attacks of september 11th how different do you think is wait wait wait i mean please thank you how different do you think is us foreign policy will be now that obama is in power okay i think we'll okay a last question here but we have to i think to stop because i'll say given last week um hillary clinton announced um america's renewed policy towards star four i was wondering what your kind of um like response to that was thank you okay i mean if you insist one last but this is the last one i just want to keep it short and simple thank you very very much for coming well that's that's a perfect way of ending the the series of questions and you have been remarkably disciplined absolutely remarkable very short questions and the result is that we have had much more questions that what i expected and it would take three two or three hours at least to deal with all these issues so i leave it no i mean you prefer to lie from here yeah okay apologies for my hearing disorder and thanks i don't see the okay my translator in some countries they have simultaneous translation so you don't have to don't need somebody like that well let's all try to go through them try not to forget any first why did the United States press Karzai to go through a second round well i mean the first round was so obviously faked that they really had only two choices either accept it and concede that there's no possible legitimacy to the U.S. British Exit NATO intervention or else try to create a cloak of legitimacy by having an election that somehow will be accepted and that's pretty standard so take say there are innumerable examples but take say one of the most interesting is Nicaragua in 1990 i mean the U.S. practically pounded the country into dust and the reason was the usual reason the virus effect in fact this is one of the i mentioned that there were some cases where the mafia principle reached literal psychosis and this was a case in point as maybe some of you remember in 1985 Ronald Reagan strapped on his cowboy boots and declared a national emergency in the United States because the threat to the security and existence of the United States posed by Nicaragua was so severe and he went on to say that the Sandinista army was only two days away from Texas so we were practically surviving but interestingly nobody laughed and there was a public reason which is like a classic illustration of the mafia principle the state department with the cooperation of the media concocted a tale about revolution without borders the Nicaraguans were planning a revolution without borders not only were they going to you know overthrow decent order in Nicaragua but they were going to extend it all over the world well that's the virus theory in this case you know particularly lunatic although not much more than many other cases and of course there's a source for revolution without borders namely a speech by Thomas Borges Sandinista leader in which he said that he hopes that the Nicaraguan revolution will be a model that others might want to follow yeah that's exactly the problem it might be a virus that might infect others so therefore we had to destroy the country which essentially happened well finally you know after the place it really was it was very hopeful place in the early 80s on the strangling Bargo would go on and so on and they listened they voted the way Bush wanted them to and then you have to look at the headlines in the newspaper like the new york times Americans united in joy over victory for us fair play that's not proud that that's the new york times okay that's why you need legitimating elections so that the press people ask about journalism can then you know applaud our nobility we're united in joy like north koreans at the american victory for fair play namely violently coercing a country into voting our way so that's what they're kind of hoping for in afghanistan can you get a cover that looks legitimate and you can proceed but this is absolutely a routine i mean case after case uh what's the effect of the rise of china going to be when it's a big topic and my own i mean china is obviously a major a significant economic power but you have to be careful about how significant i mean there's a lot of uh a friend of mine who teaches history in an american college that did a straw poll among her students asking them uh what do they think the richest countries in the world are and the two countries that were way at the top were china and india and if you read the press and commentary you might think that on the other hand if you take a look at the human development index last time i looked at china was around 90th and india was about 130th or something but those are the richest countries in the world you know and yeah they're kind of in the way like china follows independent policies you know they're used to disregarding the barbarians they've been doing it for 3000 years and they're not gonna with a brief interlude thanks to british violence uh and they're not going to pay any attention now and that's very threatening uh not they're not a military threat or anything like that but yes they pursue their own interests india's plays a more complicated role it's kind of playing both sides as a close relationship with the united states in fact uh india i'm sure you know is uh it's a nuclear weapons program out in violation of the non-proliferation treaty was given a big boost by the united states last year with the anglo-indian treaty which effectively permitted the united states to assist indian expansion of their nuclear weapons program by pretending it's for nuclear power and letting india divert resources and of course that inspires pakistan to do the same uh there was a un security council resolution a couple of weeks ago uh you know which was interpreted in the west it's not what it said but it was interpreted in the west as being a victory for obama's policy exposing irans maybe concealing something india didn't conceal a thing dare to after the security council resolution india announced that it can now produce nuclear weapons with the same yield as uh the united states and and russia so you know they're really going along and we're helping them out as usual and it didn't get reported in the united states uh well so they but on the at the same time india's uh you know it's it's kind of in many ways improving relations with china uh it's an observer in the shanghai cooperation organization which the us is looking at with a kind of a wary eye it's not clear what it'll become but it it covers uh it includes china russia the central asian states uh uh it's uh there are observers uh india pakistan iran which the us doesn't like uh mongolia which i suppose the us doesn't care about and it's uh taken positions which the the us unlike at all like it did take a stand asking for demanding in fact that us bases be removed from central asia and just how far that'll go and nobody knows scott you know it's it's an area with internal resources and pursuing an independent path which uh obviously is does not appeal to global superpower but and and of course it along with japan and some of the middle eastern countries and it owns a lot of the united states technically uh owns a lot of the debt that's a two-edge source i'm sure you know they have to sustain the us market or else they go under and they know that the us can inflate its way out of debt payment and in fact nobody talks about the us could just refuse to pay the debt who's going to do anything about it uh so that's a possibility too uh they have a military force sort of not i mean the us is just totally supreme it's a the us military and intelligence expenditures are now greater than the rest of the world combined uh and incomparably more advanced technologically you know bases all over the world and so on and so forth so what kind of a threat is china well you know it's a big virus uh not so much that maybe others will want to follow the example but you know it's not going to be pushed around easily so that's that's important undoubtedly play a big role in world affairs and us relations with china are ambivalent the us needs it as a financier and also a lot of the investment in china especially toward the high tech end is overseas mostly from overseas chinese but also others del computers for example walmart the biggest retailer in the world needs china uh because that's the way they can keep prices low you know giant bitter vicious chinese exploitation of the workers you know that keeps prices low for walmart makes them richest corporation and retail corporation so it's a complicated interrelation china i think has huge internal problems quite apart from being way down in the human development index i mean there are costs that china is ignoring i'm sure you know more about this than i do but uh they're ignoring uh ecological costs which are just handed down to future generations it doesn't make sense to measure economic growth and not consider the huge debt like what happens when you know places internally destroyed has a huge inequality on it you can't tell the exact numbers that's close society but it's undoubtedly very high with potential major problems so yes it's going to play a role in the world but you know it's really interesting to see how the conception of china and india is the richest countries in the world and a big threat has been developed and exaggerated uh not an adequate answer but i don't know an adequate answer what about the pakistan and pipelines there there is an issue there just how important it is is not entirely clear involves afghanistan there's an old plan for a tapi pipeline turkmenistan afghanistan pakistan india the idea behind that is two fold one turkmenistan has a huge amount of natural gas apparently one is to you know kind of struggle with russia but you know the pipeline works who's going to control central asian resources and if there's a pipeline to the south russia is cut out so it's kind of like than the will go pipeline that's you know winds around to avoid russia also it has to do with iran i mean the natural energy partner for india is iran and india is part of its complex game has not abandoned its relations with iran over potential a potential pipeline from iran to india which would supply a lot of its energy needs and the us which is of course trying to strangle iran and too much successful defiance it wants to avoid that to try to part presumably that's part of the reason for the angle of indian nuclear pact last year and the tapi pipeline would be an alternative it can be developed i think it's estimated to run around seven or eight billion dollars right now which could mean a lot more but it goes through kandahar province highly contested province in southern afghanistan and i presume this is some part of the motive for the us who were in afghanistan but how much we just we don't see how we can tell we don't have any internal documents and nobody's telling the truth so you have to kind of speculate about what role it plays probably some uh why support the afghan army i don't think it has to do with iranian border issues i mean iran is basically an ally of the united states and afghanistan it supported the us the us doesn't want it to be an ally it's part of the strangulation of iran but uh iran it was very hostile to the taliban for all kinds of reasons it has intimate relations with the regions of afghanistan nearby iran city of iraq and so on you know traditional relations have now been intensified and iran did cooperate with the united states in invading afghanistan and undermining the taliban and presumably would again and apparently the iranians were pretty surprised and upset when their support for the us in afghanistan was greeted with the axis of evil speech saying okay forget what you did we're going to go after you because you know the mafia principle is more important nevertheless there are good reasons for supporting the afghan army and they go back to the origins of colonialism i mean texae the british the british and india and the soldiers are mostly indian certainly up to the indian so-called mutiny you know rebellion against the british and in fact indian soldiers were being sent all over the world to fight british wars that's where the ghercas come from trick was to take the soldiers from one part of india and send them somewhere else in india or elsewhere uh and the same is true of every other colonial power i mean france used foreign legion uh britain back in the days of the american revolution used hessians i mean typically countries try to use sane imperial powers to try to use either mercenary armies like french foreign legion or indigenous armies which can be co-opted along with indigenous elites in fact that's part of the lesson that the united states learned in vietnam that there was a tack i think it's true to say as i said that the us effectively won the war but there were tactical errors and the worst tactical error was to try to use a civilian army to fight a colonial war and that just doesn't work you can't take people off the streets and expect them to fight a colonial war which is vicious brutal and sadistic in the very nature of it so the the u.s army recognized that and by the late 60s wanted to get rid of the civilian army and turn to what are called volunteers volunteers means it's a mercenary army of the disadvantage uh you don't have recruiting centers in harvard square but you do have recruiting centers in the boston slums uh and all kind of promises which are not kept about what will happen and so on and the best thing in afghanistan would be to have a mercenary army you know an afghan army and in fact the us model of imperialism was a little bit different than the european models i mean discounting the fact that the conquest of the national territory itself should be called imperialism in fact was by by the people who were carrying it out but the overseas expansion you know after 1898 uh that did develop a somewhat new model of imperialism actually there's a magisterial study of this that just came out by alfred mccoy a historian at university of wisconsin it's about the philippines the u.s invaded the philippines with of course the noblest of objectives and so on massacred a couple hundred thousand people but then they had to somehow control it and up until today it's still not controlled and what they did was novel uh the u.s occupiers developed a very high tech surveillance state using all the most advanced technology available at the time for surveillance control and so on and also for subversion so like they managed to break up the nationalist movement in part just by a careful understanding of the what was going on among the elites and starting rumors and turning people against one another and so on and so forth which was pretty successful and also co-opting elites same people who run the philippines now but in the background is as usual the male fist that was the philippine constabulary uh a mercenary army of philippinos which still pretty much dominates the society this whole framework is still in place pretty much in the philippines one of the reasons why the philippines haven't taken part in the you know so-called asian economic miracle the model that was established was firm that remained it was then applied elsewhere when Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti in the Dominican Republic applied the same a couple of years later he applied the same model left in the hands of national guards and so it goes on throughout the region and this model also bounced back to england for example uh england is the surveillance state par excellence and if you look at the history starting in world war two it's adopted a lot of these methods the us too the red scare during and after world war one was following models brought back to the united states from the people who implemented the high tech surveillance state in the philippines and the same is true since uh so that's but you need the philippine constabulary or the counterpart and that's why you need an afghan army it's uh you know that call it an afghan army but it'll be a mercenary army of afghans on the model of other imperial powers in the united states itself like the philippine constabulary the national guards the use of native american tribes during the colonization of the country itself to attack other native american tribes i mean these are the ways imperial systems work what they're trying to do in afghanistan is just a perfectly standard model but there's plenty of examples um whether they can do it or not is another question uh shrillanta well um you know it's been a horror story for especially towards the end and it illustrates a number of things uh for example it illustrates just what is meant by responsibility to protect a lot of noble rhetoric about responsibility to protect but there was no particular western advantage in protecting people are being slaughtered and driven into concentration camps so somehow that didn't make it uh in the noble rhetoric i happened to be giving a talk about this at the general assembly last summer and you know the hypocrisy was so profound it was suffocating i mean no protection for people who it doesn't do us any good to protect basically and shrillankans have that unfortunate position uh what about uh china you know they don't gain anything by supporting uh shri tamo refugees in concentration camps so why should they do it in fact most of the south supported the shrillankan government doesn't sure you know that's who they are you know they are the elites of their countries they support the elites of other countries in the south happens all the time it's it's important i mean there's another talk that i was kind of thinking of giving but i didn't but some i would like to someday that which has to do with the fall of the berlin wall uh which can be looked at quite a different way uh berlin wall fell on november 9th huge celebration in the west right now you know all kind of self-congratulation about how marvelous it was and yeah it was good that the russian dictatorship collapsed and the the eastern europeans had the breath of freedom but other things were happening at the same time so for example a couple of days later on november 16th and there was a real termination of the drive for to break out of the neocolonial order that began in the 50s and looked kind of promising in the 60s but was viciously beaten back by the western powers and it had many aspects one of them being liberation theology which was totally smashed by us violence and vatican cooperation with the help of the western powers and the last sort of whisper of it was on november 16th 1989 so also 20 years ago namely the brutal assassination of six leading latin american intellectuals jesuit priests and el saudor which kind of framed the decade of the 80s began with the assassination of an archbishop a voice for the voiceless reading mass ended with the murder of the six jesuit intellectuals by elite forces armed and trained by the united states which had already killed thousands if not tens of thousands of the usual victims you know peasants and so on this all kind of passed without a whisper in the west i mean if that had happened in Czechoslovakia we'd probably had a nuclear war but it happened in El Salvador you know these kind of insignificant people and it was a kind of a and not just El Salvador it was even worse in Guatemala mentioned and in fact it goes on like about probably a million or more people were killed in the neighborhood of south africa mozambican angola thanks in no small measure to regan support for his friends in south africa and of course defense of south africa against one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world as the washington declared it in 1988 namely the african national congress you may be relieved to know that mondello is finally removed from the terrorist list a couple of months ago so all of this was going on and it was kind of the terminus of a major attack against the south which did destroy the hopes in the early 60s for a a new world that would pay attention to things like racism inequality justice and so on that was beaten back all in many dimensions and uh november 16th was a a kind of a symbolic end to it but that's not going to be commemorated actually i have them in my office at MIT a painting that was given to me by a jesuit priest which is a kind of artistic depiction of the assassination of the six jesuit intellectuals it's a picture of the angel of death and standing under him is you know kind of a caricature of the archbishop archbishop of merah than the six jesuit priests their housekeeper and their daughter i put it there sort of to remind myself of the real world but it also has served another purpose in the last 15 or so years it's kind of a rorschach uh from the united states nobody has a clue what it is from europe maybe 10 percent know what it is from latin america up until recently everybody knew what it was what it is now that's declining as the brainwashing indoctrination begins to set in among the young just suppose that it happened in chexelachia let's say as i said we had everybody would know and we probably have had nuclear war but uh not here these are our atrocities and the culmination of massive atrocities going way back well that's uh maybe a little off mark of the question but that's an alternative talk that somebody ought to give a book that they ought to write or there's a couple of dissertations for you it's a major topic that's what we ought to be talking about this november you can guess how much discussion there's going to be about it or for that matter how much discussion there'll be about the way the bush administration reacted to the fall of the wall it's barely been discussed you know technical literature has mentioned of it but hasn't been an issue despite the fact that it's very illuminating this goes to one of these questions about what do you do about unpublicized crises it's a small unpublicized crisis they're not so small and what you do is try to break through the silence the silence is almost a you know kind of like an institutional requirement of the educated sectors of the population that's what intellectuals are for historically all the way back mainstream of intellectuals very typically have been you know flatters to court some this isn't around the fringe usually treated pretty badly if they're in Czechoslovakia you know maybe go to prison for a while if they're in El Salvador they get their brains blown out depends on the country that's administering it but that's pretty much their role and you have to break through that come back to that that's what actually a comment on the next question what can you do about unpublicized crises break through the silence and it takes work but it can be done I mean it takes say the Vietnam War which I mentioned this relates to another question about what can citizens do compare the there's a lot of comparison of the opposition to the Vietnam War to the opposition to the Iraq War but I think it's it's forgetting what happened there was almost no opposition to the Vietnam War in fact very few people even are aware of when it when it started as an actual war instead of just you know killing a lot of people and imposing a terrorist state the actual war began in 1962 that's when Kennedy who was a super hawk incidentally quite distinct from the image that's been concocted and states of in 1962 he sent the US Air Force to bomb south vietnam planes had south vietnamese markings but didn't confuse anyone authorized napalm authorized chemical warfare to destroy crops and ground cover initiated some operations again north vietnam that began programs to drive people to peasants to what amount of the concentration camps called strategic hamlets or just urban slums ultimately many millions to try to officially to protect them from the guerrillas who they knew perfectly well and it's now conceded who they were willingly supporting that's why they had to be separated from the population it's called counter insurgency very fashionable now the that's 1962 now that's a war I mean if some enemy did that we'd call it aggression and you know go crazy with hysteria there was no reaction I mean almost nothing you couldn't get three people in a room to talk about it all right there was a finally a reaction but years later roughly the time of that Bernard fall quote that I cited you know just at about the time when serious observers were wondering if the country was even going to survive uh yeah by then you had large skill opposition and it had an effect uh so if you read the pentagon papers this is very most of it is pretty routine but there are some interesting passages namely those which are never cited not unusual the pentagon papers ends in mid 1968 the right after the ted offensive a couple of months later after the ted offensive the joint chiefs uh johnson president johnson wanted to send a couple hundred thousand more troops to south vietnam the the joint chiefs of staff were didn't want to do it and they explained why they said they would need them for civil disorder control in the united states there'd be an uprising among women young people minorities and so on and they'd need the troops to control it so in fact that's one of the reasons why the business world pressured johnson to start negotiations and you know beginning of withdrawal of us troops to turn to more you know cost effective bombing instead of uh troop presence well that's uh something that the public did some people like dan elsberg who's in the time part of that time was in the administration and specialist on nuclear weapons there long history he argues he could be right that nixon probably would have used nuclear weapons when it came in if it hadn't been for the public uproar well maybe we don't know but it put a kind of a limit on it much too late i mean long past the period when it wasn't clear if it would even survive and totally inadequately with regard to north the laos and cambodi which there was no protest so they're pretty free to do things take iraq the iraq war was there was massive protest before it officially started and i stress officially because your candidate for president of the presidency of the EU and his colleague george bush knew that they were already had already started the war when they were putting on a show about the wanting diplomacy and so on but before it was officially started march 2003 there was a massive international protest i think that's the first time in history that an imperialist war has been massively protested before it was officially begun and it had an effect uh the united states could not use the united states and britain couldn't use the tactics they used in south vietnam there was no saturation bombing by the 52s so there was no chemical warfare i'm horrible enough but it could have been a lot worse and furthermore the bush administration had to back down on its war aims step by step it had to allow elections which they didn't want to do mainly a victory for nonviolent iraq protest they could kill insurgents they couldn't deal with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets and their hands were tied by the domestic constraints they finally had to abandon virtually officially at least virtually all the war aims i mean as late as november 2007 the u.s was still insisting that the status of forces agreement allow for an indefinite us military presence and privilege privilege access to iran's resources by us investors well they didn't get that on paper at least and that had to back down okay that's uh i mean there acts a horror story but it could have been a lot worse so yes this isn't protest can do something but uh and we know that from these many other examples when there's no protest and no attention uh the power just goes wild like in cambody of northern liles well i'm sort of running through the questions not exactly in order what about the future of turkey as an independent actor and turkey has very it could become a significant independent actor i mean turkey has to make some internal decisions is it you know going to face west and try to get accepted by the european union or is it going to face reality and recognize that europeans are so racist that they're never going to allow it in i mean they keep raising the barrier on Turkish entry into the EU and there are plenty to be concerned about in turkey and some horrible things but every time it improves the barrier goes up with it and if you look at polls i would have reason it's pretty obvious i mean you know europeans just don't want turks walking around the streets uh okay so someday they're going to have to face that and recognize that a future for turkey will lie in part in its strategic relationship with the west us primarily but others too but also it's opening to the east and for example a very natural trading partner for turkey is iran that can provide manufactured goods and get energy it needs and it also has you know an opening to other middle eastern countries so that's a possible future for turkey but the question was could it become an independent actor yes it could and in fact it did so quite interestingly in uh march 2003 remember what happened then i read an editorial in the guardian this morning which it's usually pretty accurate about these things but they made a distinction between old europe and new europe but they didn't draw the lines correctly they drew them in a line with contemporary propaganda which says new europe is eastern europe you know people who want nato around and old europe is the west it's not the way the lines were drawn uh they were drawn very sharply and clearly when rumsfeld proposed the concept and you know everyone applauded it old europe where the countries where the governments followed the will of the majority of the population and refused to participate in the iraqi war those were the bad guys the government was following the will of the population new europe was led by berlusconi and aznar uh italy in spain that those are countries where the government rejected a far greater majority of the population so they were the good guys new europe aznar was so great that he was invited to the summit with blaren bush when they announced the war at that time he had two percent support so therefore he was the flaming symbol of democracy but the most extreme example of old europe was turkey turkey turkey about 95 percent of the population opposed participation in the war and to everyone's surprise the turkish government went along with 95 percent of the population it's kind of like old europe you know and the united states was infuriating collin powell threatened all the sanctions and so on and uh a wolfowitz who was you know designated the idealist and chief of democracy promotion he denounced the turkish military for not rejecting 95 percent of the will of the population explained to me look you can do it you have the power and you have to under he asked the turkish military to apologize to the united states and to recognize that their job is to serve american interests that's called democracy promotion and it always passed very quietly and has now kind of been put in the part of history where unpleasant facts are but that's turkey was acting independently and you know and it's acting independently now like you know refusing to take part in the current uh the us israeli probably nato exercises which are very explicitly aimed at uh threatening iran they wouldn't go along but those are choices they have to make and what about the psychology behind american policy especially when policies become atrocious well there's an answer to this it was given by Thucydides the strong do as they wish and the weak suffer as they must okay so one of the other few principles of international relations and there aren't many principles of international relations but there are a few principle facilities the mafia principle a couple others they were very well so what about the population well you know either they're sometimes they support the atrocities usually with a sense that they're defending themselves that requires it requires a kind of a history of imposing an imperial mentality but partly just fear and that's another time when it really gets psychotic i mean if you go through the history of say the american indian wars you know the british empire it's horrific but you know all kind of horrible atrocities and they were supported you know like people like by some of the most remarkable of outstanding figures like say john steward mill is read sometime if you haven't done it his essay on humanitarian intervention which is considered a classic uh right after the atrocities in india in 1857 i mean it's heroism but but by the population generally so let's take take a case from vietnam which didn't arouse a murmur but does reflect the reason why people accept horrendous atrocities it's obvious why the powerful carry them out if they can get away with it yeah why not uh but uh why do people accept them well in 1967 linden johnson who is kind of like a person who spoke from the people you know he was expressing kind of folk wisdom uh he gave a speech in 1967 in which he explained why we have to keep fighting in vietnam and what he said was almost verbatim he said look there are 150 million of us and there are three billion of them and if might makes right they're going to sweep over us and take what we have so we have to stop them in vietnam okay that's internalized you know and it reflects deeply rooted imperial mentality and it shows up all the time that's why among elites you know educated elites there's virtually no principled criticism of the vietnam war or for that matter the iraq war i mean the strongest criticism you can find in our educated elite circles is the mistake like for example obama is you know praised because he took a principled stand against the iraq war and what was this principled stand that it was a strategic blunder you could have read that in pravda in 1983 about the invasion of afghanistan it's probably what the german general staff was telling hitler after stalingrad there's nothing principled about it it wasn't a strategic blunder it was a major crime but those notions are almost inexpressible so what's the psychology behind it it's if you get to the point where you have power and their interests you want to follow you use that power or else you're out and somebody else comes in and that person uses it's kind of like institutional facts the city's had it right as for the population it depends how manipulated they are or how much they actually believe that we're about to be overrun by those massive words you have to protect them to protect yourselves out there actually that comment from john louis gadis that i quoted before about the russian revolution maybe sounds a little less vulgar but it's similar i'm in the russian revolution was a challenge that we had to defend ourselves against because they were going to try to reform their society and they were calling for others to do the same and that justifies invasion obviously we have to protect ourselves uh well you know that's you know university you know the dean of cold war studies and so on these are very deeply rooted attitudes and they do reach the public and a lot to do about it next question was about the role of journalism well yeah that's what journalism ought to be about of course and there are some journalists who do it but them the margin who try to do it are like share the fate typically of dissidents in other societies marginalized in one way or another sometimes they partially get through you have a fringe of them on some issues but if journalism really committed itself to this role it would have to be an independent popularly supported force outside of sectors of power and that requires popular organization education i mean things like that happen that's where this journalism comes from and sometimes really survives like say i happened to be in mexico a couple of weeks ago it's about the they have a newspaper which is a real independent newspaper i think it's maybe the only one in the hemisphere it's not an offshoot of the corporate system it's not a state journal it doesn't get any ads because business won't advertise in it and it's very honest and accurate i learned i stare for a couple of days i learned things i couldn't find in the international press well a lot of dedicated journalists serious journalists and it's become i think the second largest newspaper in mexico it can be done it's not easy what about the internet it can contribute to this but you know the internet is it's it's an ambiguous instrument and you can use it for liberation you can use it for control and it's actually being used both ways and it depends it depends on people like you which way is going to work no simple answer to that um what about the role of african the african command in particularly with regard to samalia well actually here some journalists like yohan harry of the guardian have done a good job in exposing a large part of what actually happened in samalia and samalia as you know we're supposed to be worried about pirates uh yeah piracy is not nice but uh where to come from well without going into the earlier history as harry and others have pointed out one of the immediate reasons for piracy is that the european union and saudi arabia and a couple of others are simply destroying the waters of samalia's territorial waters by dumping waste toxic waste probably nuclear wastes and so on and also by overfishing okay what happens to the fisher the fishermen in samalia okay become pirates uh and then we're all upset about the piracy you know not about having created a situation where there aren't a lot of options and it can go back like a year or two further you find more so one of the great achievements of the war on terror bushes war on terror was to which was greatly hailed in the press when it was announced was closing down an islamic charity a lot of cut which was identified as you know sporting terrorists and so on okay turned out a couple of months later the government kind of quietly recognized that they were wrong and the press may have had a couple of lines about it but meanwhile it it was a major blow against samalia samalia isn't that much of an economy but a lot of it was supported by this charity not just giving money but running banks and businesses and so on it was a significant part of the economy of samalia closing it down pulled the props out from under that and is another contributory factor to the breakdown in a very weak society if you go back a couple of years beyond you find more of that so yes there's a lot to say about samalia way back which occasionally is said like there are a couple of journalists who report parts of it but not much africam is an expansion of the global system of surveillance and control at the United States it's not 1948 and the US wasn't interested in Africa and was happy to hand it over to the Europeans to exploit I mean that's changed over the years and africam is part of that system it's supposedly it's linked up to the other commands and as I mentioned the the newly expanded the south comes the southern command and Latin America is supposed to link up with it if you read that document that I mentioned the air force document it talks about how this regional system could be linked to the african command by getting bases say maybe if they can get bases and say recife in brazil closer to africa and other bases and then they can kind of link them up and it'll extend the US run a global system of surveillance and control that's the role of africa what about shift of the center of empire to other parts of the world I don't really see that happening in the at least short term future for the reasons I mentioned I mean it's a much more diverse world economically than it was say 50 years ago or even 30 years ago but militarily in terms of force it's just completely unipolar and I mentioned some of the figures but the US just dominates the whole world militarily and is helped by Britain another major military powers there's just no competitor to that nexus and none seemingly arising okay I gotta stop well one of the questions if maybe you'll be here Thursday I'll talk about then Iran in the Middle East what about US in 9-11 well that's very popular idea and it's interesting that it developed I mean it's like in the United States maybe a third of the population or something like that thinks that push was somehow responsible for 9-11 I mean and then there's a huge technical literature about you know did they find thermite and the sat and the other thing but and people devote dedicate themselves to becoming specialists in this topic but if you think about it for about 30 seconds for bush or the US to have carried out 9-11 they would have to be literally insane I mean if they were if they had carried out 9-11 they would have blamed on Iraqis not on Segurities I mean they were desperately trying to find an excuse to invade Iraq if they'd done that you know wouldn't have to worry about popular opinion get a security council resolution that NATO would go along instead by blaming it on Saudis and harming their relations with one of the most valued allies they had to jump through hoops to try to concoct an excuse for invading Iraq we know what that led to I had to get diverted into Afghanistan didn't mean that much so yeah they would have to be insane if it was an inside job the finger of guilt points to people who want it to divert the United States away from attacking Iraq and towards Saudi Arabia I can think of only two as Saddam Hussein and as Saddam bin Laden follows almost immediately so I just don't think it's a serious thesis and it's a kind of interesting question of why it seems so plausible to so many people and I think the reason for that is just the tremendous cynicism that's been aroused by what governments do you know so you're willing to believe they can do anything okay that's kind of understandable but I think one has to think about these things a bit uh obama any changes you know I think yeah some I mean there were changes between the first bush term and the second bush term the first bush term went way off the spectrum I mean so much so that it was condemned right in the mainstream you know foreign fairs and journals like that and US prestige in the world sank to historic lows so it was obvious that you know whoever has authentic power is going to pull them back and the second term was quite different it was more moderate they got rid of rumsveld and wolfwoods and a couple of the other extreme characters and they moved back more toward the moderate center and obama is doing the same maybe there'll be a little bit of a switch beyond but so far there's very little to point to and no reason to expect much and it doesn't make a lot of sense to be disillusioned obama if you look at the promises during the campaign they they were carefully constructed to be vacuous I mean hope and change don't tell you anything and any party manager who read polls would of course have picked those slogans in fact McCain did too you can read the polls and say 80 of the population thinks the country is going in the wrong direction okay hope and change you know what hope what change well it's it's like a blank slate you can write on it whatever you want uh Hillary Clinton's engagement with Darfur you know there are terrible things going on in Darfur by comparison with the region they don't amount to a lot unfortunately like what's going on in eastern Congo is worse than Darfur but Darfur is a very popular topic for western humanists because you can blame it on an enemy I mean you have to distort a lot but you can blame it on Arabs you know the bad guys so yes there's a huge movement to save Darfur but what about saving eastern Congo where maybe 20 times as many people have been killed well that gets kind of tricky for people who say like their cell phones which are using minerals from eastern Congo that are obtained by multinationals you know sponsoring militias which slaughter and kill and you know get the minerals or by simply the fact that Rwanda is probably the worst of the many agents and that's a US ally so that's kind of not a convenient topic so there's no save eastern Congo campaigns and for Hillary Clinton to join the popular saved Darfur campaign but of course not to do anything about it that's just make sense in the context of ordinary politics sorry if that sounds cynical but it's hard to think of anything else at least I can't well in the light of last in the light of the pessimism what is to be done first of all I don't if I sound pessimistic it's my fault and there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic in fact I gave some like the difference between the reaction to Vietnam and the reaction to Iraq okay you know what happened isn't nice could have been a lot worse and there were constraints imposed domestically the western imperial powers couldn't go as far as they did in Vietnam because there was more opposition and a lot of other things changed since the 60s I don't have to tell you that I'm in the US and Britain you know European countries and others third world countries there's a lot more civilized in a lot of ways rights of minorities rights of women concerned over the rights of future generations which is what the environmental movement is about didn't exist then and plenty of other things the solidarity movements which have developed in the 80s complete innovation in the history of western imperialism that came out of mainstream America a lot of it came out of churches including evangelical churches nothing like that ever happened in the history of imperialism okay it's now spread over the world that's the change global justice movements are completely new all these things happen not in a day you know but they happen over time if you look over not even a long range just a couple of decades it's a pretty dramatic change so that's not a reason for pessimism it's a reason for understanding that there's a lot that we can do in fact it's easier now than it was in the past because you can exploit the legacy that's been handed down by people who have struggled and won rights and freedom so yeah there's plenty of opportunities more privileged you are more your opportunities so there's no particular reason to be pessimistic just to be realist obam gramshys famous statement about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will yes that's a good it's a good slogan