Part 10, NOAM CHOMSKY: The New World Order
November 23, 1991
NOAM CHOMSKY:
That brings us right up until today. As far as I can see, that's what's happening
in Madrid.
This last comment. There is some thinking behind this. There is a strategic
conception behind it. It's one which is more or less permanent. It's part of the old world
order, the "new world order" and all the next ten years' world order, and so on.
The strategic conception about the Middle East is pretty simple. The major issue is the
energy reserves. The U.S. has to control them. Nobody else is allowed to interfere in U.S.
turf. Too important. There's a method for controlling them. The method is, first of all,
to construct an "Arab facade", family dictatorships which sort of manage it for
us. They're very weak, so you don't have to worry about them having any funny ideas. The
"Arab facade" has to be protected from the population of the region. That
requires regional enforcers (that's the second part), preferably non-Arab. They have
an easier time killing Arabs. So that's Turkey, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, to provide sort of
a Praetorian guard for the Saudi elite, and so on. That's what [Israel's first Prime
Minister] Ben-Gurion used to call "a periphery pact." So there is this regional
enforcer system. And then, in the background, there are the guys with the real muscle --
the United States and Britain, in case things get out of control. That's the system, and
that doesn't change very much.
Now, anyone who contributes to this system has some rights. The "Arab
facade" obviously contributes. They manage the oil wells for us. The regional
enforcers contribute. They have rights. We obviously have rights; in fact,
ultimately, we're the only ones who do. And so does our British lieutenant, so long as
they remain a lieutenant. What about the Palestinians? Well, they don't contribute to this
system. They don't have wealth. They don't have power. In fact, they're a damn nuisance.
They stir up Arab nationalism; you know, that is these pressures for these democratic
openings that are always a problem. So they have a negative value, in fact. And since they
contribute nothing to our domination of the region, it follows, by quite simple logic,
that they have no human rights whatsoever. That's an elementary principle of statecraft.
Human rights depend on your contribution to the needs of power and profit. Other than
that, it's irrelevant.
Well, they don't have any rights. In fact, they have negative rights. They're
even a nuisance. And from that, you can pretty well predict U.S. policy. And, in fact, it
works pretty well. Remember, this stuff is not quantum physics. You don't have to be
a big thinker to understand it. Big efforts are made in the academic disciplines and
elsewhere to make it look difficult. But, in fact, it's all pretty straightforward
and, at least to my knowledge, there's almost nothing in international affairs or, again,
in this stuff that a literate teen-ager couldn't figure out within a few minutes. And
that's pretty much the way it works. If you understand it, you can see what's going
on, and you can usually pretty well predict what's going to happen. You have to remember
to translate "politically correct" discourse back into English so you can get
out of those problems, but that's not too hard, either.
With regard to the Palestinians, the position really has not changed, as far as
I'm aware, since about 1948. Back in 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had already
recognized Israel. They were impressed by Israel's military victories, and they recognized
it as the second most powerful regional military force and a possible potential base for
U.S. power. That relationship then got established in later years, but there's no time to
discuss it. There was also a discussion of the Palestinians. The Israeli foreign
records show it. The U.S. didn't talk about it much, and didn't care about them. But the
Foreign Ministry in Israel --Moshe Sharrett's Foreign Ministry (this is, incidentally, the
doves) pointed out in their internal records that the Palestinians .... they said:
"They will be crushed! They will be dispersed like human waste, and will join the
most impoverished masses in the Arab world!" So there's no worry about them. As Mark
Peretz put it: "They're just another crushed nation, like the Kurds. And therefore,
we don't have to pay much attention to them. That's been the policy ever since. And, as I
just mentioned, that was Yitzhak Rabin's statement to the PEACE NOW leaders in February,
1989. He assured them that they will be broken.
Well, will they be broken? Actually, the answer doesn't lie in the Middle East.
It lies in the hands of those who are funding the operation. There is certainly no hope --
no faith in the President's "noble" intentions, or other illusions. Rather, it's
necessary to do some other things. The first one is to clear away the mountains of rubble
that conceal the events of history -- not only in this case, but in every other one -- to
view what's happening without any illusions, and to create public pressures that can put
an end to the extreme rejectionist policies that the United States has been pursuing
virtually alone in the World. If we're honest, we'll also be able to see that this
is true in Central America and, indeed, throughout the subject domains generally of what
is euphemistically called "the South".
The President is right, to a degree, when he says "What we say goes."
What remains to be determined is what we choose to be.
Thanks.
(END OF SPEECH)
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PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V |
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| PART VII | PART VIII | PART IX | PART X |
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Transcribed for JCOME by John DiNardo.
