Chomsky v.s. Kaplan

This is old, but worth revisiting. Kaplan never had the chance to respond, so what to readers say in response to Chomsky’s excoriation of Kaplan? I’ll weigh in later.

Kaplan on Chomsky

ES: How do you argue against the kind of critiques that Chomsky and others have made, questioning how America can have any moral credibility in the world, to judge what’s good and what’s bad, to call Osama Bin Laden a terrorist when its own foreign policy has supported dictators and terrorists in the past, therefore its foreign policy is essentially hypocritical, it’s only self-interest masked in humanitarian aid, but really America is exactly what some of the terrorists say: hypocritical, self-interested, dictatorial, only working for it’s own benefit.

KAPLAN: I wish Noam Chomsky had been with me in Romania in the 1970s or 1980s, just one of seven or eight Warsaw Pact states, with just one of seven or eight prison systems with seven hundred thousand political prisoners who were starved, tortured etc.

Adult choice of foreign policy is made on distinctions and the argument you presented has absolutely no distinctions. There’s a big difference between the quantity and the kind of dictators we supported and the quantity and kind of things that went on in the communist world for 44 years when you had a mass system. Mao Zedong killed 20 million people as part of the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962. That’s just one of many, many atrocities that I name.

How can you compare that or Romania under communism, or 30 or 40 regimes like that, with the level and kind of iniquities that the Americans committed? It’s about distinctions, and distinctions are about adulthood. And I don’t find that even an adult argument.

The response:

CHOMSKY: OK, so let’s take his example, Romania under Ceausescu. Hideous regime, which he forgot to tell you the United States supported. Supported right until the end, as did Britain. When Ceausescu came to London he was feted by Margaret Thatcher. When George Bush the First came into office, I think the first person he invited to Washington was Ceausescu. Yes, Romania was a miserable, brutal regime supported by the United States right to the end, as Robert Kaplan knows very well, so the example he gave is a perfect example.

ES: It wasn’t supported by the States in the 70s though?

CHOMSKY: In the 70s, in the 80s, right to the end of Ceausescu’s rule. It was supported by the United States. The reasons had to do with great power politics. They were sort of breaking Warsaw Pact policies and so on, but the very example he picks illustrates it and we can proceed onward.

So the very example he gives shows the absurdity of his position and it’s a small example because we support much more brutal regimes. It has nothing to do with Cold War issues….

ES: Well, what Kaplan says is – there is a distinction “¦that everyone’s got some blood on their hands, but he says – we have significantly less blood because we are soft imperialists, not state terrorists.

CHOMSKY: So when we supported his example – Ceausescu in Romania, right to the end, that’s good? How about killing several million people in Vietnam. How about killing hundreds of thousands of people in Central America in the 80s, leaving four countries devastated beyond, maybe beyond recovery? …

ES: Kaplan says the world is nasty. If you leave people alone, they’ll kill each other and that’s why what you need is what he calls an organizing hegemon”¦

CHOMSKY: Which is always us. Right and why is it us? Because we have the power and we have a massively subservient intellectual class, of which he’s an illustration, which will support U.S. atrocities no matter how awful they are.… I’m talking about the most elementary morality. If a person doesn’t understand that, they have no right to talk. OK? If you don’t understand that you pay attention to your own crimes, you have no right to talk.

ES: He talks about Machiavellian virtue. He says that sometimes the end justifies the means, sometimes we do a bad thing to protect our democracy and our good institutions in a just society.

CHOMSKY: And how are we protecting our democratic institutions by supporting mass slaughter in South Eastern Turkey in the last few years? Was that supporting our democratic institutions?

ES:Would Kaplan argue that the nation state has a right to use any means necessary to protect its sovereignty?

CHOMSKY: Oh then he’s justifying Milosevic. He’s saying Milosevic had the right to do anything he wanted to repress the Kosovars in Albania. Is that what he’s saying? …

ES: Should there be an organizing hegemon, do we need a constabulary, a force, a central force. In this case it’s America because it’s a superpower. Sometimes use unjust means in the service of just causes.

CHOMSKY: What are the just causes? What was the just cause in, for example, slaughtering Kurds in South Eastern Turkey? What was the just cause in supporting Suharto? When he killed a couple hundred thousand landless peasants in Indonesia, went on to become one of the biggest torturers in the world and destroyed, slaughtered a third of the population in East Timor, what was the just cause?

What was the just cause when we invaded South Vietnam 40 years ago? This is the 40th anniversary of the public announcement of the U.S. attack on South Vietnam, ending up killing millions of people, leaving the country devastated. They’re still dying from chemical warfare. What was the just cause?

What was the just cause when we fought a war to a large extent against the Catholic Church in Central America in the 1980s, killing hundreds of thousands of people, every imaginable kind of torture and devastation, what was the just cause? The just cause for people like Kaplan was yes, we did it, therefore it’s a just cause. You can read that in the Nazi archives too.