All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:29
Noam Chomsky: The Race War of Drug Prohibition
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I'm extremely pleased, of course, to have the illustrious Noam Chomsky, who I'm sure, for my listeners, needs no introduction.
A fellow anarchist, a great thinker, an ethicist, a study of language, and so on.
Thank you so much, Dr. Chomsky, for taking the time today.
Glad to be with you.
So, one of the things that I've always admired in your analysis, particularly of foreign policy, is your statement that for a moral principle in particular to have any validity, it must be universal.
And there's a weird kind of thing that happens where we have this private morality that we teach our kids and we expect from each other no initiation of force and negotiation rather than aggression.
and telling the truth and then we go into the public sphere and everything is completely reversed and now lying becomes diplomacy and aggression becomes defense.
What do you think the primary mechanisms are by which we can have these moral reversals and the general population doesn't even seem to notice it let alone question it?
Well, I'm not sure that the population doesn't notice it.
But remember, when you turn to public policy, you're not referring to the decisions and choices of the general public, but rather to those who dominate one or another system of power that vary over the world.
But everywhere you look, there's some kind of system of power and hierarchy and domination.
And that's where decision making goes along with the decision.
There's no reason to expect that those with power may voice the kind of ethical principles that people like to believe that they follow.
But there's no reason to believe that that guides their choices and decisions.
So, for example, if you read even the worst monsters, Stalin, Hitler, Japanese fascists and so on, the Their pronouncements were most elevated and loving democracy and freedom.
Stalin's constitution was a model of humanity, but of course that had nothing to do with their policies.
And we should have the honesty to recognize the same is true of us.
Different structures, different mechanisms, not everything's identical, but that basic property remains.
It still remains true that the people making the decisions represent, first of all, the system of power that's in the state itself, but also their own primary constituencies.
In the United States, it's not a great secret what they are.
The wealthy and the corporate sector are the primary constituencies.
Easily demonstrated, and has been demonstrated, that even in mainstream political science, Those are the voices.
The part of the public whose voices are heard are essentially those.
Most of the public is basically disenfranchised.
So the split between private morality and public policy is not surprising for that reason alone.
And then we have to add to it the techniques that are used by the powerful.
To try to impose conformity and obedience on the public, often simply by frightening them.
So, for example, it takes Obama's terror campaign, global terror campaign, the drone campaign.
Now, that's sold to the public on the basis of inducing fear.
We're doing it to protect you.
You know, it's unpleasant, but we've got to protect you.
Just the merest, apart from the fact that this is a monstrous crime in itself, nevertheless, it's even understood by the directors and perpetrators that they're generating terrorists faster than they're killing a presumed jihadist.
In fact, they're even developing a technology of terror, which is just They'll be using small drones to attack us.
In fact, you can even read articles about this in the professional journals.
It's just not a concern.
The security of the population is simply not a high concern for state power now, or for that matter ever.
They have other concerns.
But nevertheless, inducing fear in the population It's a common and often very successful way of gaining at least thin public support for policies that people as individuals would not tolerate.
Right, right.
One of the things I think that certainly gives me some hope is the reduction of the power of gatekeepers for cultural conversations.
You know, you used to have to go through mainstream media to be able to get out.
And I think you had mentioned in one of your interviews how Crossfire had little interest in you because you didn't have the kind of concision where they could fit you in between commercial breaks.
And the fact that you can have extended and interesting conversations that can be broadcast worldwide With very little equipment, with very little money, to me gives a great deal of hope that not having to go through the gatekeepers can really help us to elevate the discussion.
Does it give you similar hope or is there something tragic that I'm sort of missing in looking at it this way?
Well, I think what you describe is a very positive development.
But as always, the world is complicated.
So part of the One of the consequences of the proliferation of media outlets is that it's currently having a tendency to try to drive to compartmentalize people in the sense that people are very likely to focus their attention on the kind of media outlets that reinforce their own beliefs.
Biases and prejudices.
I'm subject to it too.
The blogs that I look at, I think, are the ones that I think I'm going to sympathize with what the writers are probably saying.
We all do that.
Which is okay to a point, but it also tends to narrow our own perspectives.
We're often not seeing other points of view, which we should expose ourselves to.
I think we all ought to try to compensate for that.
I try my own ways, and I'm sure you do in yours, but there is one of the effects of the diversification of media sources is a tendency towards Becoming more parochial and narrow in one's perspective on the world.
The constant reinforcement of one's own views and less challenged.
Right, right.
Now you've written quite a bit about the kibbutzes and some of the ways in which you've admired them.
I know you've lived on one as well for a time.
And you've talked about some of the negatives, some of the racism towards Arabs and the fact that they sort of be a feeding conveyor belt to the Israeli military.
But one thing I found quite fascinating with the degree to which social norms in these organizations are reinforced through social ostracism, through conformity, and that all sounds sort of bad and negative, but compared to government laws, which are almost universally disastrous, it seems to me a very interesting way, and I think this is one of the ways in which anarchism is supposed to be able to help reinforce social norms,
How far do you think social ostracism can go, or voluntarism in one's relationships can go, in enforcing social norms?
Well, it's a double-edged sword.
As you say, it's better than guns and clubs.
On the other hand, it can be extremely psychologically and personally harmful, both to the actors and to the victims.
So it's the kind of thing that I think one should consciously try to avoid as much as possible.
I mean, social norms have to be basically accepted, at least to some degree.
We all have to agree to drive on one side of the road and so on, not anywhere we like.
There's many others, but it can quickly be overdone.
It has to be tempered by a high degree of tolerance, of sympathy, of willingness to question one's own beliefs and the norms that one accepts, to listen to alternatives, to treat people with dignity and respect, even if we don't agree with them.
So I think there's always going to be a decent social organization.
There'll always be tensions between these conflicting goals and resolving them in a civilized and humane fashion is a real problem.
that people have to face.
And you can see it in all sorts of ways around the world.
So just to give one example, by accident, I happened to visit Norway on two recent occasions.
One happened to be at the same time that they apprehended Breivik, the perpetrator of the hideous massacre.
And the second time happened to be at the time when he had just been sentenced.
I was quite struck by the attitude, as far as I could tell, of the public towards these events.
when he was apprehended, the attitude, as far as I could tell, in the media and talking to people and so on, was not let's tear him to shreds and throw him to the dogs, but he's a human being.
He committed a hideous crime.
He has to be given his day in court.
In fact, he was given time to rant and rave in court.
And then when I returned at the time of the sentencing, in the United States, he would have been probably hanged and put in an electric chair in five minutes.
He was given a, I think, a 20-year sentence under conditions that are so decent by our standards that they're almost indescribable.
not on a maximum security prison with 23 hours a day of isolation, torture and so on, but in relatively civilized conditions and a chance for rehabilitation, which nobody expects, but it's an option.
These are two pretty similar societies in many ways, but the attitude of just respecting the rights of a human being, no matter how horrible his crimes, to a dignified humane treatment no matter how horrible his crimes, to a dignified humane treatment and even potential These differences were startling.
And it doesn't go very far back in history.
If you look at the history of Norwegian criminology, it's a pretty recent.
Societies can change.
Yeah, it is one of the things that's struck me recently is Portugal has had a decade-long experiment in the decriminalization of drugs and have seen a 50% reduction in addiction and in drug use because they treat these people as people who need help, who have some medical issues, who have dependency issues.
Compared to this unbelievable gulag fest of the US industrial prison complex, it is positively medieval, and this is again, as you've pointed out many times, how the US is so unbelievably out of step with the rest of the Western world in approaching these issues.
That's true, and it's also, as you know, it's even worse.
The US is, the drug programs in the United States are basically a race war, and that's been true ever since Reagan.
That's true from The mode of police action that's required to the sentencing procedures, to the form of criminalization, and even to the treatment of people released from prison.
It's, as you said, medieval, brutal, extremely harmful, and very race-oriented.
You can see it in the incarceration rates.
reminiscent of what happened in the late 19th century after the Civil War.
It was about 10 years in which the freed slaves had kind of formal freedom, but right after that, after the Reconstruction, there was a compact between the North and the South, which essentially allowed the South to do whatever they liked, and they essentially criminalized black life.
So huge numbers of Blacks, originally males, mostly were sent off to prison.
In fact, they became a kind of a slave labor force.
In many ways, even worse than slavery, because for an employer's point of view, you're getting, you know, you have to maintain your labor force.
The state does it for you.
And this went virtually to the Second World War.
Then there were a couple of decades of relative freedom again, and now we're turning towards again criminalizing black lives through the drug war.
It has almost no effect on drug use or the price of drugs.
But it is devastating to the parts of the society that are attacked by this, and also it's devastating to Latin America.
It's been extremely harmful to Latin America.
They're the real victims.
And you can see what you mentioned about the isolation of the United States is becoming quite dramatic in the Western Hemisphere.
So the last Hemispheric Conference a couple years ago in Colombia.
The United States and Canada were completely isolated from the rest of the hemisphere on the two major issues.
One was permitting Cuba back into the hemispheric organizations.
All of Latin America's in favor, US and Canada refused.
And the second was moves towards decriminalization of drugs, which are going pretty far in some places.
In Uruguay, as far as legalization, other places decriminalization, some following the Portuguese model.
But in general, towards more humane treatment and treatment that is in fact effective, rather than treatment that is destructive, harmful, brutal, and in our case racist as well.
It's real major crimes.
I'm afraid of...
I've got to take off. - All right, so, just ask you one more question.
I have a fairly extensive audience that is generally on the libertarian, not the sort of European libertarian, but the American libertarian audience, and I'm sort of like the Pied Piper trying to get them to become anarcho-curious, I guess is the best way of putting it.
And one of the questions that's often asked is, you know, show us an example of successful anarchic experiments in the world.
And, you know, everybody reads 1984 and Animal Farm.
How many people read An Homage to Catalonia?
I wonder if you could just touch on, for our libertarian friends, The experiments that were really, really compelling and fascinating that occurred in the 30s in Spain in particular, which could give people something to explore or something to look at as an example of how effective these kinds of organizations can be.
Well, actually, there was one year of revolution in Spain, the mostly anarchist revolution in 1936, which was actually quite successful until it was crushed by force.
It's striking that it was crushed by the combined forces of every power system in the world.
The communists, the fascists, the liberal democracies.
Then they fought each other to pick up the spoils.
But one thing they weren't going to tolerate was a free society of people running their own affairs.
But there's plenty more.
I wouldn't call them pure anarchists by any means, but systems that have many of those characteristics.
So take, for example, the Mondragon conglomerate in Spain, Basque country in Spain, big conglomerate, worker-owned, partially worker-managed, not totally.
It includes industrial production, including high-tech industrial production, banks, hospitals, living, housing, and so on.
And it's quite successful.
Take what's happening in parts of the old Rust Belt in the United States, where there's a spread of worker-owned enterprises, not huge, but developing pretty successful.
There's interesting work on this by Adar Alparovitz in particular.
These all have a kind of an anarchist flavor to them.
describe your audience, that there's one crucial difference between American libertarianism and traditional libertarianism.
Traditional libertarianism was opposed to any form of dominance in hierarchy.
One of the slogans was, no god, no master, meaning no ecclesiastical dominance, no masters in industry and personal life and families anywhere else.
American libertarianism is quite different.
It's perfectly happy to support masters.
In fact, it extols them.
It's in favor of it.
It wants no interference with the domination and control of people in the workforce, let's say.
That's very counter to traditional libertarianism, either in Europe or, for that matter, in the United States.
If you go back to the 19th century, early days of the Industrial Revolution, there were mass popular movements which had their own journals, you could read what they said and so on.
They were opposed to the way in which the industrial system was forcing them to turn into Destroying their independence as free people, also destroying their culture.
Their slogan was, those who work in the mill should own them.
That was taken for granted.
In fact, it was what they called wage slavery, wage labor.
They regarded it as not very different from chattel slavery.
That was such a popular position in the United States in the 19th century that it was a slogan of the Republican Party.
Wage labor is tolerable because it's temporary, but people should control their own industrial fate.
This is as American as apple pie and quite different from what's called libertarianism today.
These are important things to bear in mind.
So if I can just dig in for one last question.
It seems to me that the presidency of Barack Obama is quite important historically.
One of the cases I made years ago before he got in for even his first term was that you really couldn't have a greater divergence in stated principles or cultural backgrounds than between the younger George Bush and Barack Obama.
But a lot of the hopes of the left seems to have really collapsed and Barack Obama has expanded a lot of the surveillance state.
As you say, the war on terror, foreign aggression and so on seems to have really grown.
Do you think that this may tempt people on the left to be more skeptical about political solutions?
Is there going to be other things bubbling up to try and find a way to move us towards a freer society without going through the often kabuki theater of electoral politics?
Well, electoral politics in the United States has become a kind of a theater.
It's nobody's secret that it's mostly bought, and mostly responds to the very narrow sectors of wealth and private power.
But I think there shouldn't have been illusions about Obama in the first place.
And I don't say this in retrospect, actually.
writing about him before the first primaries, 2008 primaries, just looking at his, the way he presented himself and his webpage, what he was proud of and so on.
I felt that there were, you know, he wasn't George W. Bush, but I didn't feel that there was going to be any really substantial changes.
Much of what would happen would be negative.
I mean, I am surprised by some things.
I have been surprised by the severity of his attack on civil liberties.
I didn't expect that.
I don't understand what's driving it, even politically, what he thinks he's gaining from it.
But that's often things that aren't very well known, like one of the worst Supreme Court decisions, in my opinion, was what's called Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.
was brought by the Justice Department, by Obama's Justice Department, against a group, the Humanitarian Law Project, which was giving legal advice to a group that the government put on its terrorist list.
Terrorist list is something we should be pretty skeptical about.
So, for example, Nelson Mandela was on it a couple of years ago.
And it's just pure executive authority with no supervision, no recourse, and so on.
But the idea that providing legal advice to such a group as the government calls material assistance to terrorism, that's a really severe attack on civil liberties.
And in fact, if you read the colloquy of the judgment, it looks as if If you say advise one of these groups to turn to non-violent methods, or you just try to research what they're doing, that could be to material assistance to terrorism.
Things like that are a major attack on elementary civil liberties.
It's not the only case.
And why the Obama administration is pressing this so hard is a little hard for me to see.
But I have to say that most of what's going on has not been a big surprise, unfortunately.
And I don't think it should tell people, let's stop being involved in politics, but let's stop having illusions about leaders.
That's not the way things are going to change.
Well, I would certainly agree with that and I know that we're a little short for time.
I certainly do appreciate the conversation as I have for many years your work, particularly the analysis of foreign policy.
We'll, of course, put your website on the links of this and I would certainly invite all our Libertarian listeners to check out your work.
On anarchism, I found a great read and thank you again for all that you're doing.
Glad to be with you.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection