MORE FROM CHOMSKY: ROOTS OF RACISM
The Roots of Racism – An Interview With Noam Chomsky
circa 1995
All over the world — from LA to
the Balkans to the Caucasusto
India — there’s a surge of tribalism, nationalism, religious fanaticism,
racism. Why now?
Chomsky: First of all, let’s remember that it’s
always been going on. I grant you that, but it seems more pronounced. In parts
of the world it’s more pronounced. Take Eastern Europe.
Europe is altogether a very racist place, even worse than the US, but Eastern Europe is
particularly ugly. That society traditionally had very bitter ethnic hatreds.
One of the reasons why many of us are here is that our grandparents fled from
that. Up until a couple of years ago, Eastern Europe was under the control of a
very harsh tyranny — the Soviet system. It immobilized the civil society, which
meant that it eliminated what was good, but it also suppressed what was bad.
Now that the tyranny is gone, the civil society is coming back — including its
warts, of which there are plenty.
Elsewhere in the world, say in Africa,
there are all kinds of atrocities. They were always there. One of the worst
atrocities was in the 1980s. From 1980 to 1988, US-backed South Africa was
responsible for about a million and a half killings, plus about sixty billion
dollars worth of damage — and that’s only in the region surrounding South
Africa. Nobody here cared about that, because the US was backing it. If you go
back to the 1970s in Burundi, there was a huge massacre, tens of thousands of
people killed. Nobody cared. In Western Europe, there’s an increase in
regionalism. This in part reflects the decline of their democratic
institutions. As the European Community slowly
consolidates towards executive power, reflecting big economic concentrations,
people are trying to find other ways to preserve their identity. That leads to
a lot of regionalism, with both positive and negative aspects. That’s not the
whole story, but a lot of it.
Germany had the most liberal
asylum policies in the world — now they want to limit civil liberties, and ban
political parties.
Chomsky: There’s a lot of talk about German
racism, and it’s bad enough. For example, kicking out the Gypsies and sending
them off to Romania is a scandal you can’t even describe. The Gypsies were
treated just like the Jews in the Holocaust, but nobody’s batting an eyelash
about that because nobody gives a damn about the Gypsies. But we should
remember that there are other things going on too, which are getting less
publicity. Take Spain. It was admitted into the European Community with some conditions.
One was that it’s to be a barrier to the hordes ofNorth Africans whom the Europeans are afraid will
flock up to Europe. There are plenty of boat people trying to get across the
narrow distance between North Africa to Spain — kind of like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. If they make
it, the boat people are immediately expelled by the Spanish police and navy.
It’s very ugly. There are, of course, reasons why people are going from Africa
to Europe and not the other direction. There are five hundred years of reasons
for that. But it’s happening, and Europe doesn’t want it. They want to preserve
their wealth and keep the poor people out. The same problem is occurring in
Italy. The Lombard League, which includes a
kind of neofascist element, won a recent electoral victory. It reflects
northern Italian interests. They don’t want to be saddled with the poor people
in the south of Italy. And they’re concerned about the North Africans coming up
from the south, drifting up through Sicily into Italy. The north Italians don’t
want them — they want rich white people.
That brings in the whole question
of race and racism and how that factored into the relationship between the
North and the South.
Chomsky: There has always been racism. But it
developed as a leading principle of thought and perception in the context of
colonialism. That’s understandable. When you have your boot on someone’s neck,
you have to justify it. The justification has to be their depravity. It’s very
striking to see this in the case of people who aren’t very different from one
another.
Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the
earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms
as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren’t human.
They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them. Some Marxists say racism
is a product of the economic system, of capitalism. Would you accept that? No.
It has to do with conquest, with oppression. If you’re robbing somebody,
oppressing them, dictating their lives, it’s a very rare person who can say:
“Look, I’m a monster. I’m doing this for my own good.” Even Himmler didn’t say
that. A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression,
whether it’s throwing them in gas chambers or charging them too much at a
corner store, or anything in between. The standard reaction is to say: “It’s
their depravity. That’s why I’m doing it. Maybe I’m even doing them good.” If
it’s their depravity, there’s got to be something about them that makes them
different from me. What’s different about them will be whatever you can find.
And that’s the justification.
Then it becomes racism. You can always find something — they
have a different color hair or eyes, they’re too fat, or they’re gay. You find
something that’s different enough. Of course you can lie about it, so it’s
easier to find. Take the Serbs and the Croats. They’re indistinguishable. They
use a different alphabet, but they speak the same language. They belong to
different branches of the Catholic Church. That’s about it. But many of them
are perfectly ready to murder and destroy each other. They can imagine no
higher task in life.
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Extract:
“There has always been racism. But it developed as a
leading principle of thought and perception in the context of colonialism.
That’s understandable. When you have your boot on someone’s neck, you have to
justify it. The justification has to be their depravity. It’s very striking to
see this in the case of people who aren’t very different from one another. Take
a look at the British conquest of
Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in
the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They
weren’t human. They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them. No. It
has to do with conquest, with oppression. If you’re robbing somebody,
oppressing them, dictating their lives, it’s a very rare person who can say:
“Look, I’m a monster. I’m doing this for my own good.” Even Himmler didn’t say
that. A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression,
whether it’s throwing them in gas chambers or charging them too much at a
corner store, or anything in between. The standard reaction is to say: ‘It’s
their depravity. That’s why I’m doing it. Maybe I’m even doing them good.’ If
it’s their depravity, there’s got to be something about them that makes them
different from me. What’s different about them will be whatever you can find.”
- Noam Chomsky
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Let’s Start With Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan was the first president I remember. He was
President for the first 8 years of my life. As a kid I didn’t like his face. He
looked like the word egare in Kreyol, which means confused
lost, simple-minded or retarded. It was only later one that I was given a
reason not to like him. Let me list them for you:
Originally neutral in the Iran–Iraq War of 1979 to 1988, the Reagan
administration began supporting Iraq because an Iranian victory would not serve
the interests of the United States.
Reagan did not support federal
initiatives to provide blacks with civil rights. He opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
He also said (while campaigning
in Georgia) thatConfederate President Jefferson Davis was
“a hero of mine.”
In 1980 Reagan said the Voting
Rights Act was “humiliating to the South,” although he later supported
extending the Act. Reagan was unsuccessful in trying to veto another civil
rights bill in March . Reagan engaged a policy of Constructive engagement with
South Africa in spite of apartheid, opposing pressure from Congress and his own
party for tougher sanctions until his veto was overridden.
At first Reagan opposed the Martin Luther King holiday,
and signed it only after an overwhelming veto-proof majority (338 to 90 in the
House of Representatives and 78 to 22 in the Senate) voted in favor of it.
Congress overrode Reagan’s veto
of the Civil Rights
Restoration Act of 1988. Reagan said the Restoration Act would impose too
many regulations on churches, the private sector and state and local
governments.
Why Reagan?
Chomsky: the answer
is precisely this:
Racism never went away. It became more covert in its social and
global articulation. Furthermore every time the public makes some
progress that would promote great harmony socially, the government steps in to
undo what was done. The Voting Right act was gutted this summer. This didn’t
happen over night. I am of the opinion that nothing happen in a vacuum or
overnight. I do not think that we can talk about progress now when
what was done in the past can be gutted, marginalized and neutered.
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