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Government Involvement with Science And Art
An interview with Noam Chomsky
By Noam Chomsky and Ollie Mikse
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For liberal educated America, you cannot say the United States did anything wrong. Maybe some individuals did, but they can't do anything wrong by definition. The U.S. can make mistakes, but they can't be criminals. That's a deep element of the intellectual culture across the spectrum. In 1971, a lot of people were saying the war was criminal. A majority of the American population was saying the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake, and that's dangerous. So you have to do something about that. They had to turn us into the victims and that was done by concocting the myth of an addicted army.
If you listened to Walter Cronkite, he would say that the "commies" are not only attacking our boys with rifles, they're attacking them with drugs. They're going to come back and start a criminal rampage in the country and they're going to destroy us. That was across the spectrum. Actually, there are studies and it turns out that drug addiction among soldiers was kind of at the level of the youth culture—pretty much what you'd expect. There was addiction, it was alcohol, but that's not considered addiction.
So what you have is this mythology that was used by the law and order side as the reason the youth were going crazy, and they won't listen to us because they're all high on pot. So you declare a war on drugs. And it worked.
By 1977, Jimmy Carter was able to give a press conference in which he was asked, "Do we owe anything to the Vietnamese?" He answered by saying no we don't because the destruction was mutual.
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Around the same time the economy was being financialized. There was a reduction of productive industry, which means no jobs for working class people who happened to be black, so you have to do something with the superfluous population. What are you going to do with them? Toss them in jail. It was around that time—from Reagan until now—that the incarceration rate went from the norm for industrial countries to way beyond any country that has statistics. Look who's there. A very high percentage are blacks and now Hispanics who are there on drug charges. So it was a way to get rid of the superfluous population. It was a way of turning us into the good guys in Vietnam. It was a way of imposing law and order. And abroad it's just a cover for counterinsurgency. You want to, say, carry out chemical warfare in Colombia to clear the land for multinationals to drive the population away? You call it a drug war.
It's quite interesting because study after study shows that the drug war has no effect on drug use or even drug prices. The price of cocaine in New York stayed about the same, despite the huge amount of money that went into it.
Why do you think that in this modern time when science is more embraced than it's ever been, people still cling onto the idea of intelligent design regardless of the evidence present for evolution. Do you think it's scientists failing to communicate the idea efficiently?
It's partly that. But remember, it's mostly a U.S. phenomenon. In part it's due to strains in the culture that go back to the early colonists. Remember this country was settled by religious fanatics. Take a look at the colonists who came over from England. There's a streak of providentialism, meaning carrying out God's will, which is very strong in American culture, including the leading figures.
There was an article last year in Seed magazine called "The Essential Parallel between Science and Democracy" and it talks about U.S. policy favoring an alliance between science and business. Do you feel that an alliance like this is ideal if we are to expect the maximum benefits of the scientific community?
Let's take everything we talked about. Do you use a computer? That's science contributing to business. Is it a good thing to do? Maybe, but if you go back to the 1950s, suppose people were given a choice, an honest choice, "Look, do you want your grandchildren to have an iPod or do you want better health and education?" Maybe they would have said, "I want my grandson to have an iPod." But they weren't given that choice. These are real decisions that have to be made. Should we have solar energy? Yeah, I think we should. Should it be an honest choice among the population or should it be overwhelmed by business propaganda, which says it's all a liberal farce?
But there's no general comment to make about science and the public good. I mean it all depends on social and economic conditions, on power relations, on commitment to democracy.
Ollie Mikse is a graduate student at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center and a freelance journalist for Punknews. org, Ground Control Magazine, Ghetto Blaster, and, on occasion, Razorcake. My thanks go to Lydia Sargent, Bev Stohl, Emily Yoder, and Liz Laribee for making this interview happen.
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