by Stephen Baskerville, Howard University
PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 35, no. 4 (December 2002),
a journal of the American Political Science Association.
Fatherhood is rapidly becoming the number one social policy issue in America. President Bill Clinton stated in 1995 that "the single biggest social problem in our society may be the growing absence of fathers from their children's homes, because it contributes to so many other social problems." In 1997, Congress created task forces to promote fatherhood, and in 1998 the governors' and mayors' conferences followed. President George W. Bush recently unveiled a $315 million dollar package for "responsible fatherhood." Nonprofit organizations such as the National Fatherhood Initiative were formed in the mid-1990s. Fatherhood was seen as the most serious social problem by almost 80% of respondents to a 1996 Gallup poll (NFI 1996, 1). Fatherhood advocates insist that the crisis of fatherless children is "the most destructive trend of our generation" (Blankenhorn 1995, 1). Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherlessness: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, teen pregnancy, suicide---all correlate more strongly to fatherlessness than to any other single factor. The majority of prisoners, juvenile detention inmates, high school dropouts, pregnant teenagers, adolescent murderers, and rapists all come from fatherless homes (Daniels 1998; NFI 1996). The connection is so strong that controlling for fatherlessness erases the relationships between race and crime and between low income and crime (Kamarck and Galston 1990).
Yet despite its salience in public policy debates and within psychology, sociology, and law, fatherhood has received little attention from political scientists. This neglect is not a minor omission. Arguably it is what has left the phenomenon unexplained. For despite a decade of attention, little attempt has been made to account for where the fatherhood crisis comes from in the first place. While it doubtless has a number of contributing social and economic causes that stretch back decades, there is evidence that the critical dimensions it has assumed in the last decade proceed at least in part from public policy, and that the problem should be seen less as sociological or psychological and more as political. What is neglected is the large governmental machinery that has arisen at the federal, state, and local levels---and abroad---to address family issues. Extensive executive-branch agencies administer not only welfare but child protection, child-support enforcement, and other quasi-police functions.
Yet the linchpin of this machinery is the judiciary: the little-understood system of family courts, which have arisen during the last 40 years. Like the fatherhood problem itself, this apparatus is most highly developed in the Anglophone countries, with the marked political role the common law tradition bestows upon the judiciary and with their more extensive history of divorce (Riley 1991). The organization varies, but virtually every state and democratic country now has special courts and civil service agencies for family issues (DiFonzo 1997). Fatherlessness and the judicial--bureaucratic machinery connected with it have grown up together as increasingly worldwide phenomena. The conventional wisdom---enunciated by political leaders, media commentators, and scholars on both left and right---assumes the problem stems from paternal abandonment. Clinton said the fathers pursued by his administration "have chosen to abandon their children" (Clinton 1992). David Blankenhorn writes that "the principal cause of fatherlessness is paternal choice . . . the rising rate of paternal abandonment" (Blankenhorn 1995, 22--23). The little work by political scientists perpetuates this assumption. "Husbands abandon wives and children with no looking back," writes Cynthia Daniels (1998, 2). "Millions of men walk out on their children," says Robert Griswold (1998, 19).
Conservatives, who have done most to call attention to fatherlessness, also accept this explanation. Lionel Tiger writes that men "are abandoning women. . . . It supplies much of the 50 percent divorce rate. . . . Perhaps this helps explain the single-mother rate of over 30% of births across the industrial world" (Tiger 1999, 57--58). Leon Kass blames feminism for "male liberation---from domestication, from civility, from responsible self-command." All this may seem intuitively correct, but is it true? In fact, no government or academic study has ever shown that large numbers of fathers are voluntarily abandoning their children. Moreover, those studies that have addressed the question have arrived at a rather different conclusion. In the largest federally funded study ever undertaken on the subject, psychologist Sanford Braver found that the "deadbeat dad" who walks out on his family and evades child support "does not exist in significant numbers." Braver found at least two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. Moreover, few of these divorces involve legal grounds, such as desertion, adultery, or violence (Braver 1998).
Other studies have found much higher proportions, with one concluding that "who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce" (Brinig and Allen 2000, 126--27, 129, 158). The importance of this finding cannot be overestimated. Policymakers clearly assume the contrary, imposing punitive measures on allegedly dissolute fathers. "Children should not have to suffer twice for the decisions of their parents to divorce," Republican Senator Mike DeWine stated in June 1998, "once when they decide to divorce, and again when one of the parents evades the financial responsibility to care for them." Cases of unmarried fathers, usually younger and poorer, are more difficult to document. Yet here too the evidence contrasts with the stereotype. One study of low-income fathers ages 16-25 found that 63% had only one child; 82% had children by only one mother; 50% had been in a serious relationship with the mother at the time of pregnancy; only 3% knew the mother of their child "only a little"; 75% visited their child in the hospital; 70% saw their children at least once a week; 50% took their child to the doctor and large percentages reported bathing, feeding, dressing, and playing with their children; and 85% provided informal child support in the form of cash or purchased goods such as diapers, clothing, and toys (Wilson 1997).
A study of low-income fathers in England found that "the most common reason given by the fathers for not having more contact with their children was the mothers' reluctance to let them. . . . Most of the men were proud to be seen as competent carers and displayed a knowledge of child-care issues" (Speak et al. 1999). Also challenging the deadbeat stereotype, a Rutgers-Texas study found that many fathers state governments want to track down for child support are so destitute that their lives focus on finding the next job, the next meal, or next night's shelter. "They struggle with irregular, low-wage employment," the authors write. "But economically and emotionally marginal as many of these fathers were, they . . . continue to make contributions to their children's households and to maintain at least a relationship with those children" (Edin and Lein 1998).
So if fathers are not abandoning their children in record numbers, why are so many children without fathers? Some 40% of the nation's children and 60% of African-American children live in homes where their fathers are not present (Popenoe 1993). Part of the answer may be found by examining the governmental institutions that regulate the relationships between parents and their children. The first point of contact between most parents and the state is again the family court and the bureaucratic machinery that surrounds it. Family courts are a little-studied institution, yet they possess powers unlike any other governmental body. Unlike other courts, they are usually closed to the public, generally leave no record of their proceedings, and keep few statistics on their decisions, so information is difficult to obtain. In some ways they are closer to administrative agencies than courts; one prominent judge describes them as a "social service delivery system." Uniquely, their mandate is not even to administer justice as such but to determine "the best interest of the child." Because this may involve no transgression by litigants, family courts would appear to be the only courts that can summon and impose their orders on citizens accused of no legal infraction.
Thus while family courts sit lowest in the judicial hierarchy, paradoxically they are regarded as the most powerful. "The family court is the most powerful branch of the judiciary," according to Robert Page, presiding judge of the family part of the Superior Court of New Jersey. By their own assessment, "The power of family court judges is almost unlimited" (Page 1993, 11). Perhaps most startling is that by some accounts they claim to be exempt from the U.S. Constitution. Family courts describe themselves as courts of "equity" or "chancery" rather than "law," implying they are not necessarily bound by due process, and the rules of evidence are not as stringent as in criminal courts. As one father reports being told by the chief investigator for the administrator of the courts in New Jersey, investigating a complaint in 1998: "The provisions of the U.S. Constitution do not apply in domestic relations cases since they are determined in a court of equity rather than court of law." A connected rule, known as the "domestic relations exception," prevents federal courts exercising constitutional review over family law cases. Family courts handle matters such as divorce, custody, child support, child protection, domestic violence, and juvenile crime. Their workload is determined by the existence of these problems, all of which are directly connected with fatherless homes.
Recalling Dickens' observation that "the one great principle of the law is to make business for itself," it may not be overly cynical to suggest that family courts and their entourage have developed a vested interest in separating children from their parents. Though mothers and parents in intact families can also find their children confiscated (a trend that seems to be increasing), the process most often begins with the removal of the father, the weakest link in the family chain (Mead 1969, 198). The children then become effectively wards of the state, where they can be seized from their mothers as well, often on accusations of child abuse (Hewlett and West 1998; Wexler 1990). Like other state court judges, family court judges are elected or appointed and promoted by commissions dominated by lawyers and other professionals (Jacob 1964; Tarr 1999, 61--70). They are political positions, in other words, answerable to the bar associations who effectively appoint them or finance their election campaigns and who naturally have an interest in maximizing the volume of litigation (Corsi 1984, 107--14; Watson and Downing 1969, 98, 336).
While family courts, like all courts, complain of being overburdened, it is clearly in their interest to be overburdened, since judicial powers and salaries, like any other, are determined by demand. "Judges and staff work on matters that are emotionally and physically draining due to the quantity and quality of the disputes presented," Judge Page explains. "They should be given every consideration for salary and the other `perks' or other emoluments of their high office." If the judiciary is viewed in part as a business, then the more satisfied the customers---in this case, the bar associations and divorcing parents who expect custody---the more customers will be attracted. "With improved services more persons will come before the court seeking their availability," writes Judge Page. "As the court does a better job more persons will be attracted to it as a method of dispute resolution" (Page 1993, 19--20). The more attractive the courts make divorce settlements, the more their business and the more children will be removed from, in most cases, their fathers. One tool at their disposal is restraining orders, which exclude fathers (or mothers) from their children for months, years, and even life. These orders are routinely issued during divorce proceedings, usually without any evidence of wrongdoing. Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Women's Bar Association, has written that restraining orders are doled out "like candy." "Restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to virtually all who apply," and "the facts have become irrelevant," she found. "In virtually all cases, no notice, meaningful hearing, or impartial weighing of evidence is to be had" (Epstein 1993, 1).
The rationale was revealed during a judges' training seminar, when municipal court judge Richard Russell told his colleagues: Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you're violating as you grant a restraining order. Throw him out on the street, give him the clothes on his back, and tell him, see ya around. . . . We don't have to worry about the rights. (Bleemer 1995, 1) Professional associations and "revolving doors" connect family courts to executive branch agencies that handle child protection and child support enforcement. These agencies likewise can be said to have a interest in removing children from their fathers. Judges also wield substantial powers of patronage, whereby lucrative positions "are generally passed out to the judge's political cronies or to persons who can help his private practice" (Jacob 1984, 112). The links connecting these professionals and agencies with the courts can be glimpsed from those documented cases that cross the line into illegality. One investigation uncovered a "slush fund" operated by Los Angeles family court judges into which attorneys and other "court-appointed professionals" contributed.
The professionals included court monitors, who received up to $240 a day to watch fathers accused of spousal or child abuse while they are with their children, raising the question of whether the payments resulted not simply in certain individuals receiving appointments in preference to others but in the function itself being created in the first place (O'Meara 1999). What appears to be involved is not simply individual bribery to favor particular individuals or cases but a kind of systemic, institutional bribery leading to innocent fathers being monitored. This fund may be exceptional, in that it was exposed. But it may be exceptional only in degree, given that court officials have more subtle methods of rewarding judges who send business their way. Such connections extend to the legislative branch, where the available documentation relates mostly to criminal cases, which may nevertheless constitute the tip of a larger, quasi-legal iceberg. In March 2000 four Arkansas legislators, including the most powerful member of the Arkansas Senate, were convicted on federal charges of racketeering for taking kickbacks and arranging government contracts for personal benefit, mostly connected with child custody and child support. One scheme ostensibly provided legal counsel to children, a practice that extends the patronage of judges by bringing in additional attorneys, often at litigants' expense though in this case with state funds voted for by lawmakers.
Columnist John Brummett of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote on April 29, 1999, that "no child was served by that $3 million scam to set up a program ostensibly providing legal representation to children in custody cases, but actually providing a gravy train to selected legislators and pals who were rushing around to set up corporations and send big checks to each other." The program "not only sailed through the legislature without extended comment or eligibility restriction," as is often the case with legislation promoted for children, "but got its insider contracts expeditiously approved at the Arkansas Supreme Court." The offense for which the senators were indicted was not the diverting of contracts to their own firms---which is apparently considered legal---but receiving personal kickbacks and the cover-up. The underlying point here is that such opportunities only become available once children are removed from their parents.
The largest component of government fatherhood policies is child-support enforcement. Here too the courts, civil services agencies, and private firms have a stake in separating children from their fathers. Nearly 60,000 agents now enforce child support throughout the United States, about 13 times the number in the Drug Enforcement Administration worldwide. This does not include the rapidly growing number of private enforcement companies. Though theoretically part of the executive branch, public agencies maintain close relationships with family courts. David Gray Ross, head of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) in the Clinton administration, began his career as a family court judge before moving on to higher courts and a stint in a state legislature. "He was honored as `Judge of the Year of America' by the National Reciprocal Family Support Enforcement Association in 1983 and as `Family Court Judge of the Nation' by the National Child Support Enforcement Association [NCSEA] in 1989" . That these groups bestow honors upon judges (and a federal government web site would boast about it) indicates their financial interest in family court decisions, primarily the one removing children from their fathers that sets the process in motion and then the punitive child-support award that necessitates their services. NCSEA's Internet site lists its members as "state and local agencies, judges, court masters, hearing officers, district attorneys, government and private attorneys, social workers, caseworkers, advocates, and other child support professionals," as well as "corporations that partner with government to enforce child support" >. In other words, it includes officials from at least two branches of government plus the private sector, who all have a financial interest in having children separated from their fathers.
Setting child support levels is likewise a political process dominated largely by collection personnel. About half the states use guidelines devised by courts and executive-branch enforcement agencies that interpret and enforce them (Morgan 1998, table 1-2). Such legislating by courts and enforcement agencies raises questions about the separation of powers and thus the constitutionality of the process. The method of formulating child support guidelines, according to a Georgia district attorney, "violates both substantive due process and equal protection guarantees of the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Georgia" (Akins 2000). The review process is likewise controlled largely by enforcement personnel. Virginia completed its review in 1999 with a commission consisting of one part-time member representing fathers and 11 full-time lawyers, judges, child-support enforcement agents, and representatives of other organizations who have a vested interest in both removing children from their fathers and making the fathers' support obligations as burdensome as possible (Koplen 1999). Georgia commissions have comprised "individuals who are unqualified to assess the economic validity of the guidelines, or who arguably have an interest in maintaining the status quo, or both," Williams Akins writes. Of the 11 members in 1998, "Two were members of the judiciary, two represented custodial parent advocacy groups, four were either present or former child support enforcement personnel and two were state legislators" (Akins 2000).
These ethical conflicts extend to the private sector, where an obvious financial interest exists in creating fatherless children. Child-support enforcement is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, with claimed arrearages of up to $68 billion and growing (HHS 2001). Privatization has created a large industry of firms with a stake in pursuing parents, such as Policy Studies Incorporated (PSI), SupportKids, and Lockheed Martin IMS. These firms are also involved in setting the levels of what they collect and so can create the very delinquents on which their business depends. From 1983 to 1990, Robert Williams, now president of PSI, was a paid consultant with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he helped establish uniform guidelines for the states with a grant from the National Center for State Courts. During this time, a federally driven approach led to significantly increased obligations. When the Family Support Act of 1988 required states to implement child-support guidelines (and gave them only a few months of legislative time to do so or lose millions in federal funds), most opted for Williams' guidelines, the model being devised by the agency overlooking the program (Akins 2000; Rogers and Bieniewicz 2000). One year after joining HHS, and the same year the federal guidelines were created, Williams started PSI, which targeted privatization opportunities with those he had consulted. In 1996, his company had the greatest number of child-support-enforcement contracts of any of the private companies that held state contracts (Johnston 1999). Company promotional literature reports that PSI operates 31 privatized service locations in 15 states. The Denver Business Journal reported on 27 June 1997, that PSI had grown "by leaps and bounds because of the national crackdown on `deadbeat dads,'" even before welfare reform legislation took effect, by which the company "stands to profit even more."
More significant than the profiteering is the level of obligation. PSI has a vested interest not only in making the child-support levels as high as possible to increase its absolute collection, but also in making them so high that they create arrearages and "delinquents." Only by creating a level of obligation high enough to create hardship, can the guidelines create a large enough pool of defaulters to ensure demand for collection services. Like his public sector counterparts, Williams's business depends on creating as many deadbeat dads as possible. Williams's model sharply raised obligations and has been widely criticized. Economist Mark Rogers has charged that it resulted in "excessive burdens" based on a "flawed economic foundation." Williams himself has stated, "There is no consensus among economists on the most valid theoretical model to use in deriving estimates of child-rearing expenditures," and, "Use of alternative models yields widely divergent estimates of the percentages of parental income or consumption allocated to the children." Donald Bieniewicz, member of an advisory panel to OCSE, comments: "This is a shocking vote of `no confidence' in the . . . guideline by its author" (Bieniewicz 1999, 2; Rogers 1999; Williams 1994, 104--105).
Yet on the basis of this guideline, parents are being arrested and jailed, usually without trial. The politics of fatherhood is difficult to classify according to existing political vocabularies. It possesses similarities to a patronage machine, wherein judgeships themselves are distributed (Glick 1978, 510). The judge in turn sits at the center of a distribution system where he or she is in a position to reward friends and punish enemies. Yet the patronage wielded in family court appears to be less partisan and more pecuniary (cp. Ashman 1973, 242; Jacob 1984, 112; Stumpf and Culver 1992, 49). The judge who sits at the center of the machine is not necessarily in command of it, and a judge who fails to see to the interests of the attorneys and other professionals can be punished when the time comes for reappointment and promotion. What is unprecedented is the commodity in contention. Children serve as the tool or even weapon in disputes among contending parties, not only parents but government officials. Control of children brings control over adults and confers power and financial rewards on those who can successfully claim to be acting in the children's interest (Brinig and Allen 2000, 133, 156).
The politics of fatherhood may thus be seen as part of a larger politics of children which is only beginning to receive scrutiny (Hewlett and West 1998; Mack 1997; MacLeod 1997). An extensive literature already examines family politics and lays the groundwork for political scientists to go further in understanding the developing role of the state in family relationships (Binion 1991; Dewar 2000; Elshtain 1989; Houlgate 1998; Okin 1991). What must now be explored is what happens when specific state institutions step in to assume control over children and, in the name of their well-being or that of the larger society, regulate their relationships with their parents.
Notes 1. Government fatherhood programs exist in Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. In June 1997 the German magazine Der Spiegel ran a cover story on "The Fatherless Society." The problem is increasing in countries with such traditional family morality as Japan and India (e.g., Bhadra Sinha, "No Time For Each Other," The Times of India, 3 December 2000). References Akins, William C. 2000. "Why Georgia's Child Support Guidelines Are Unconstitutional," Georgia Bar Journal 6 (October).
Ashman, Charles R. 1973. The Finest Judges Money Can Buy. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing.
Bieniewicz, Donald J. 1999. "Improving State Child Support Guidelines." Testimony to the Virginia Child Support Quadrennial Review Panel, Richmond.
Binion, Gayle. 1991. "On Women, Marriage, Family, and the Traditions of Political Thought," Law and Society Review 25 (2).
Blankenhorn, David. 1995. Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem. New York: Basic Books.
Bleemer, Russ. 1995. "N.J. Judges Told to Ignore Rights in Abuse TROs," New Jersey Law Journal 140 (24 April).
Braver, Sanford L., with Diane O'Connell. 1998. Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
Brinig, Margaret F. and Douglas W. Allen. 2000. "These Boots Are Made for Walking: Why Most Divorce Filers are Women," American Economics and Law Review 2 (Spring).
Clinton, Bill. 1992. Nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden, New York, July 16, 1992 : 0,1176,2-11034-,00.html print news home www.voter.com>January 12, 2001.
Corsi, Jerome R. 1984. Judicial Politics. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Daniels, Cynthia, ed. 1998. Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Dewar, J. 2000. "Family Law and its Discontents," International Journal of Law, Policy, and the Family 14 (April).
DiFonzo, J. Herbie DiFonzo. 1997. Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Edin, Kathryn, and Laura Lein. 1998. Low-Income, Non-Residential Fathers: Off-Balance in a Competitive Economy : eln98.htm ELN fatherhood.hhs.gov>September 30, 2001.
Elshtain, Jean B. 1989. "Family, Politics, and Authority." In Children, Parents, and Politics, ed. Geoffrey Scarre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Epstein, Elaine M. 1993. "Speaking the Unspeakable," Massachusetts Bar Association Newsletter 33 (June-July).
Glick, Henry R. 1978. "The Promise and the Performance of the Missouri Plan: Judicial Selection in Fifty States," University of Miami Law Review 32.
Griswold, Robert L. 1998. "The History and Politics of Fatherlessness," In Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America, ed. Cynthia Daniels. New York: St. Martin's Press.
U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Ways and Means. 1998. Green Book. Section 8: Child Support Enforcement Program. Print WMCP:105-7, DOCID: f:wm007_08.105, U.S. Government Printing Office Online via GPO Access. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/useftp.cgi?IPaddress=162.140.64.21&filename=wm007_08.105&directory=/disk2/wais/data/105_green_book (September 27, 2001).
Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, and Cornel West. 1998. The War Against Parents. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Fact Sheet, March 16, 2001. http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2001pres/01fssupport.html (October 1, 2001).
Houlgate, L.D. 1998. "Must the Personal Be Political? Family Law and the Concept of Family," International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 12 (1).
Jacob, Herbert. 1964. "The Effects of Institutional Differences in the Recruitment Process: The Case of State Judges," Journal of Public Law 13.
Jacob, Herbert. 1984. Justice in America: Courts, Lawyers, and the Judicial Process. 4th ed. Boston and Toronto: Little Brown.
Johnston, James R. 1999. "The Father of Today's Child Support Public Policy," Fathering Magazine. August. http://www.fathermag.com/907/child-support/ (October 1, 2001).
Kamarck, Elaine Ciulla, and William Galston. 1990. Putting Children First: A Progressive Family Policy for the 1990s. Washington: Progressive Policy Institute.
Kass, Leon R. "The End of Courtship," The Public Interest. http://www.thepublicinterest.com (March 26, 2002).
Koplen, Barry M. 1999. Minority Report. Richmond, VA: Quadrennial Child Support Guideline Review Commission.
Mack, Dana. 1997. The Assault on Parenthood. New York: Simon and Schuster.
MacLeod, Colin M. 1997. "Conceptions of Parental Autonomy," Politics and Society 25 (March).
Mead, Margaret. 1969. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. New York: Dell.
Morgan, Laura W. 1998. Child Support Guidelines: Interpretation and Application. New York: Aspen Law and Business.
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Okin, Susan Moller. 1991. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books.
O'Meara, Kelly. 1999. "Is Justice for Sale in L.A.?" Insight 15 (3 May).
Page, Robert W. 1993. "`Family Courts': An Effective Judicial Approach to the Resolution of Family Disputes," Juvenile and Family Court Journal 44 (1).
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Riley, Glenda. 1991. Divorce: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rogers, R. Mark. 1999. "Wisconsin-Style and Income Shares Child Support Guidelines: Excessive Burdens and Flawed Economic Foundation," Family Law Quarterly 33 (Spring).
Rogers, R. Mark, and Donald J. Bieniewicz. 2000. "Child Cost Economics and Litigation Issues: An Introduction to Applying Cost Shares Child Support Guidelines." Presented at the Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting, Alexandria, VA.
Speak, Suzanne, Stuart Cameron, and Rose Gilroy. 1999. Young Single Fathers: Participation in Fatherhood -- Bridges and Barriers. London: Family Policy Studies Centre.
Stumpf, Harry P., and John H. Culver. 1992. The Politics of State Courts. New York: Longman.
Tarr, G. Alan. 1999. Judicial Process and Judicial Policymaking. Belmont, CA: West/Wadsworth.
Tiger, Lionel. 1999. The Decline of Males. New York: Golden Books.
Watson, Richard A., and Rondal G. Downing. 1969. The Politics of the Bench and the Bar. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Wexler, Richard. 1990. Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
Williams, Robert G. 1994. "Implementation of the Child Support Provisions of the Family Support Act." In Child Support and Child Well Being, ed. Irwin Garfinkel, Sarah McLanahan, and P.K. Robins (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press).
Wilson, Pamela. 1997. "Helping Young Dads Succeed," Family Life Educator, Spring 1997.
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Friday, October 12, 2007
The Incredible Case Of The Cuban Five
The Cuban Five
by Lawrence Wilkerson
Sept. 19, 2007
Reprinted from: http://thehavananote.com/2007/09/the_cuban_five.html
I attended a briefing by Leonard Weinglass (he of the Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers fame, of the Amy Carter tribulations, and other famous efforts to achieve justice against at times huge odds) at Howard University's Law School on Wednesday, 12 September. I was stunned by what counselor Weinglass revealed.
As a military officer for 31 years, I occasionally encountered Cuba. In exercises, I recall vividly that when we wargamed "the Cuba scenario" what happened was that the U.S. Navy, the FBI, the Florida State Police, the Coast Guard, and a host of other folks got involved not in invading Cuba, but in preventing a group of Cuban-Americans in Florida from doing so. I might add that such actions violated U.S. law and so, in the exercises—which were in my view very realistic—we spent our time attempting to stop several hundred small boats, loaded with automatic weapons, explosives, and lots of Cuban-Americans, from getting to Cuba. So, I was acquainted with some of the vagaries of U.S. Cuba policy.
At Howard University last week, I learned the truth about yet another vagary—"The Cuban Five." Here's a quick backgrounder.
Because the Cuban government had come to much the same conclusion as the U.S. military and did not want to be invaded by a bunch of Cuban-Americans from Florida, it decided to send five Cubans to Florida to spy on this "invasion group". (And what I haven't mentioned is that this group of Floridians is considered to be a group of terrorists by Cuban authorities. Why? Because over the past few years this group has allegedly carried out terrorist acts in Cuba and killed by some counts over 3,000 Cubans. One of these acts was to bring down a Cuban airliner with 76 souls on board, all of whom perished.)
When these five Cubans began reporting back to Havana about what they were discovering in Florida, the picture became very clear. In short, Cuban authorities were convinced that their country did indeed have much to worry about.
So, in Havana the thought was, let's give this evidence our five "spies" have gathered to the U.S. FBI. Surely, the FBI will then understand what the U.S. military already understands, i.e., the threat to peace in the Straits of Florida is in Florida not in Cuba. And so Havana did just that. It gave to the FBI the evidence its five men had gathered in southern Florida.
What did the FBI do? Well, here is the crux of the matter. The FBI turned the evidence over to the U.S. Government and it, in turn, used the evidence not to investigate and, if necessary, arrest and prosecute the law-breaking Cuban-Americans and their supporters in southern Florida, but to arrest and eventually imprison for life the five men who "spied" on these fine, loyal Floridians.
When the case came to trial, a change of venue was warranted and asked for because no Miami court was going to give the Cuban Five a fair trial, since the city is largely in the hands of some of the very Cuban-Americans and their supporters who've allegedly perpetrated these atrocities on the Cuban people and are prepared to invade the island. But the change of venue motion was denied. And of course the five were convicted.
But on appeal, in a decision by three of the judges of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the trial's results were thrown out—as of course they should have been on the denial of the change of venue motion alone. The Five returned to Cuba and their families, right?
No, because in a full meeting of the 11th Circuit Court with all 12 members present, the ruling of the three members was reversed and The Five went back to jail, where they have been now for nine years.
The case is being reviewed yet again even as I write. That is one of the reasons that Leonard Weinglass gave the briefing at Howard University that I attended. He wanted to inform us of this apparently egregious miscarriage of justice and solicit our support in getting the decision reversed.
If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, it is hard to believe that this case ever happened in the first place—unless, of course, one contemplates the real power of this group of Cuban-Americans in Florida and the hold they exercise over the U.S. Government.
But this case sort of takes the cake: to punish with life sentences men who came here to determine how and when their country was going to be attacked by people breaking U.S. law. These men were unarmed, not intent on any physical damage to the United States, and were motivated to protect their fellow citizens from invasion and repeated attacks by Cuban-Americans living in Florida.
And we have to ask also, just how is it that we have become a safe haven for alleged terrorists? How is it that we—the United States of America—may rate a place on our own list of states that sponsor terrorism?
If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, this case is truly the bottom of the pit. I had great trouble believing it, but I had nothing with which to refute Mr. Weinglass' superbly delivered presentation. But more than that was my four years inside the Bush Administration. You see, I know the depths to which our government is capable of sinking. Torture. Lies. False intelligence. Tyranny. Is the continued failure to resolve fairly this case against the Cuban Five, even though it began in the second Clinton administration, really so unbelievable when cast against the characters of the current administration?
Talk to your congressman or woman, please. This is a travesty. And, by the way, if you can disprove any of what Mr. Weinglass contends, fire away. America has many disastrous actions chalked up to its discredit at the moment, so to be disabused of one of such heavy import would be a gift from the gods.
The Havana Note is a group blog covering various corners of the cultural, political, military and economic dimensions of US-Cuba relations. The US-Cuba field has one big dividing line down the middle making it nearly oxymoronic to talk about "US-Cuba relations" -- except as a relationship where two parties closely related historically, culturally, and geographically nonetheless have archaic, Cold War-fashioned rules of engagement with each other.
This site will provide researchers and journalists who travel to Cuba an outlet to disseminate information and perspectives learned while there. The Havana Note, which will be regularly featured on The Washington Note, will probe the current state of US-Cuba policy and whether political realities justify revising America's approach to the eleven million person island-nation.
The Havana Note is a project of the "21st Century US-Cuba Policy Initiative" based at the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program. The initiative’s objective is to take advantage of recent developments in Cuba and the United States to redirect US-Cuba policy and relations toward a more sensible, mutually beneficial direction and forge a new consensus of national stakeholders in favor of engagement with Cuba rather than the decades-old, tried and failed strategy of isolating Cuba and its citizens.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel, US Army (Retired)
Lawrence Wilkerson is the Visiting Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government at the College of William Mary, as well as Professorial Lecturer in the Honors Program at the George Washington University. His last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02). Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army, including as Deputy Executive Officer to then-General Colin Powell when he commanded the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and as Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 and then worked as an advisor to General Powell.
Obtained from: http://www.freethefive.org
See also:
http://www.antiterroristas.cu
by Lawrence Wilkerson
Sept. 19, 2007
Reprinted from: http://thehavananote.com/2007/09/the_cuban_five.html
I attended a briefing by Leonard Weinglass (he of the Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers fame, of the Amy Carter tribulations, and other famous efforts to achieve justice against at times huge odds) at Howard University's Law School on Wednesday, 12 September. I was stunned by what counselor Weinglass revealed.
As a military officer for 31 years, I occasionally encountered Cuba. In exercises, I recall vividly that when we wargamed "the Cuba scenario" what happened was that the U.S. Navy, the FBI, the Florida State Police, the Coast Guard, and a host of other folks got involved not in invading Cuba, but in preventing a group of Cuban-Americans in Florida from doing so. I might add that such actions violated U.S. law and so, in the exercises—which were in my view very realistic—we spent our time attempting to stop several hundred small boats, loaded with automatic weapons, explosives, and lots of Cuban-Americans, from getting to Cuba. So, I was acquainted with some of the vagaries of U.S. Cuba policy.
At Howard University last week, I learned the truth about yet another vagary—"The Cuban Five." Here's a quick backgrounder.
Because the Cuban government had come to much the same conclusion as the U.S. military and did not want to be invaded by a bunch of Cuban-Americans from Florida, it decided to send five Cubans to Florida to spy on this "invasion group". (And what I haven't mentioned is that this group of Floridians is considered to be a group of terrorists by Cuban authorities. Why? Because over the past few years this group has allegedly carried out terrorist acts in Cuba and killed by some counts over 3,000 Cubans. One of these acts was to bring down a Cuban airliner with 76 souls on board, all of whom perished.)
When these five Cubans began reporting back to Havana about what they were discovering in Florida, the picture became very clear. In short, Cuban authorities were convinced that their country did indeed have much to worry about.
So, in Havana the thought was, let's give this evidence our five "spies" have gathered to the U.S. FBI. Surely, the FBI will then understand what the U.S. military already understands, i.e., the threat to peace in the Straits of Florida is in Florida not in Cuba. And so Havana did just that. It gave to the FBI the evidence its five men had gathered in southern Florida.
What did the FBI do? Well, here is the crux of the matter. The FBI turned the evidence over to the U.S. Government and it, in turn, used the evidence not to investigate and, if necessary, arrest and prosecute the law-breaking Cuban-Americans and their supporters in southern Florida, but to arrest and eventually imprison for life the five men who "spied" on these fine, loyal Floridians.
When the case came to trial, a change of venue was warranted and asked for because no Miami court was going to give the Cuban Five a fair trial, since the city is largely in the hands of some of the very Cuban-Americans and their supporters who've allegedly perpetrated these atrocities on the Cuban people and are prepared to invade the island. But the change of venue motion was denied. And of course the five were convicted.
But on appeal, in a decision by three of the judges of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the trial's results were thrown out—as of course they should have been on the denial of the change of venue motion alone. The Five returned to Cuba and their families, right?
No, because in a full meeting of the 11th Circuit Court with all 12 members present, the ruling of the three members was reversed and The Five went back to jail, where they have been now for nine years.
The case is being reviewed yet again even as I write. That is one of the reasons that Leonard Weinglass gave the briefing at Howard University that I attended. He wanted to inform us of this apparently egregious miscarriage of justice and solicit our support in getting the decision reversed.
If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, it is hard to believe that this case ever happened in the first place—unless, of course, one contemplates the real power of this group of Cuban-Americans in Florida and the hold they exercise over the U.S. Government.
But this case sort of takes the cake: to punish with life sentences men who came here to determine how and when their country was going to be attacked by people breaking U.S. law. These men were unarmed, not intent on any physical damage to the United States, and were motivated to protect their fellow citizens from invasion and repeated attacks by Cuban-Americans living in Florida.
And we have to ask also, just how is it that we have become a safe haven for alleged terrorists? How is it that we—the United States of America—may rate a place on our own list of states that sponsor terrorism?
If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, this case is truly the bottom of the pit. I had great trouble believing it, but I had nothing with which to refute Mr. Weinglass' superbly delivered presentation. But more than that was my four years inside the Bush Administration. You see, I know the depths to which our government is capable of sinking. Torture. Lies. False intelligence. Tyranny. Is the continued failure to resolve fairly this case against the Cuban Five, even though it began in the second Clinton administration, really so unbelievable when cast against the characters of the current administration?
Talk to your congressman or woman, please. This is a travesty. And, by the way, if you can disprove any of what Mr. Weinglass contends, fire away. America has many disastrous actions chalked up to its discredit at the moment, so to be disabused of one of such heavy import would be a gift from the gods.
The Havana Note is a group blog covering various corners of the cultural, political, military and economic dimensions of US-Cuba relations. The US-Cuba field has one big dividing line down the middle making it nearly oxymoronic to talk about "US-Cuba relations" -- except as a relationship where two parties closely related historically, culturally, and geographically nonetheless have archaic, Cold War-fashioned rules of engagement with each other.
This site will provide researchers and journalists who travel to Cuba an outlet to disseminate information and perspectives learned while there. The Havana Note, which will be regularly featured on The Washington Note, will probe the current state of US-Cuba policy and whether political realities justify revising America's approach to the eleven million person island-nation.
The Havana Note is a project of the "21st Century US-Cuba Policy Initiative" based at the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program. The initiative’s objective is to take advantage of recent developments in Cuba and the United States to redirect US-Cuba policy and relations toward a more sensible, mutually beneficial direction and forge a new consensus of national stakeholders in favor of engagement with Cuba rather than the decades-old, tried and failed strategy of isolating Cuba and its citizens.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel, US Army (Retired)
Lawrence Wilkerson is the Visiting Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government at the College of William Mary, as well as Professorial Lecturer in the Honors Program at the George Washington University. His last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02). Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army, including as Deputy Executive Officer to then-General Colin Powell when he commanded the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and as Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 and then worked as an advisor to General Powell.
Obtained from: http://www.freethefive.org
See also:
http://www.antiterroristas.cu
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Saturday, October 06, 2007
The Soviet Model and the economic cold war
From the blog 21st Century Socialism-
by Marcus Mulholland / December 31st 2006
The Soviet Model and the economic cold war
The way that Russia marked the 15th Anniversary of the end of the USSR, the final events of which took place between the 8th and 31st of December 1991, has caused consternation in the Western media.
The Washington Post cautioned:
“…don't look for parades in Moscow to celebrate the anniversary [of Gorbachev’s resignation on December 25th]. There will be no fireworks, no national commemoration of the epochal event of the last half of the 20th century.
“By contrast, the 100th birthday of the late Leonid Brezhnev last week touched off a wave of nostalgia for the old apparatchik with the bushy eyebrows. Wreaths and flowers were laid at his tomb in Red Square, conferences were held on his legacy, a street and park were renamed for him. A state television correspondent rhapsodized about how he ‘was quite a hit with the ladies.’ A poll showed that more than 60 percent of Russians saw the Brezhnev era in a positive light compared with 17 percent who did not.”
Under the headline “Nostalgia for USSR increases”, the US government foreign broadcasting service Radio Free Europe –Radio Liberty complained:
“The tumultuous course that Russia has followed ever since [the fall of the USSR] has generated, perhaps inevitably, a fervent desire among some to recast the past in a rosy hue.”
That “some” is the majority of Russians according to opinion polls. The RFE-RL report continued:
“The shelves of Moscow bookstores are stuffed with more than 500 new books on the life of Josef Stalin; more than half of them are apologist in tone.”
RFE-RL also noted a new assessment of the causes of the end of the Soviet Union:
“In 2006, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) released a fresh volume of its history, including an analysis of the Soviet collapse. The SVR dismisses the theory that the death of the USSR was historically predetermined. Instead, it depicts the downfall as a chance combination of adverse historical circumstances and the ‘failed policy’ of Gorbachev.
“The study notes efforts by the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the American intelligence community to weaken the USSR during the final stages of the Cold War. These efforts included the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative -- better known as ‘Star Wars’ -- that aimed at exhausting the Soviet economy by setting a new bar in military and defense parity. They also included restrictions of exports of Western hi-tech to Russia, the fall in oil prices, and U.S. support to anti-Soviet operations in Poland and Afghanistan.
“But, in the view of SVR analysts, it was neither Reagan's strategy nor special operations by the CIA that created the crisis in the Soviet system. In the words of the report, it only ‘aggravated’ it.”
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last president, had based his policies on the premise that the USSR’s economic difficulties – which he referred to as ‘stagnation’ – were caused by the Soviet Union’s socialist economic model: universal public ownership and the central planning of production. But as this system was dismantled and replaced by privatisation and the dominance of market forces, Russia and the other republics of the former USSR went into catastrophic industrial and social decline, which continued throughout the 1990s.
The failure of the capitalist reforms to deliver on the promises of economic dynamism and higher living standards (except for an elite minority) was not an experience confined to the former USSR and other ex-socialist states. The majority of South American countries, for example, underwent a process of de-industrialisation and mass impoverishment during the neo-liberal 1980s and 1990s, an experience which is fuelling the current movements on that continent for a turn towards socialism.
Consideration of both the achievements of the Soviet economy and of the difficulties which paved the way to its abolition is important not only for Russians making sense of their own history. As neo-liberal capitalism is increasingly challenged in the 21st Century, people searching for an alternative economic model are looking at current and historical examples and finding them problematic. Yugoslavia, whose industries were nationalised but allowed to compete with each other on a market basis, suffered from high unemployment and disparities in regional development; the USA assisted its economy as a counterweight to the USSR, and when US support was withdrawn its ‘market socialism’ could not survive. China, with its mixture of state and private investment, is becoming the industrial workshop of the world, importing production technology and energy, and exporting cheap manufactured goods - at the price of rising inequality, the impoverishment of the scores of millions who cannot find steady work in foreign or state-owned firms, and environmental degradation. Cuba, which has retained the main elements of its centrally-planned economic model, suffered badly in the early and mid 1990s, but is now growing strongly as it extends trade and investment links with Latin America and China.
When looking at the relevance of the Soviet experience, one has to contend with analyses, both from left and right, which isolate the economic policies followed in a particular country from other factors and attribute success or failure almost completely to the correctness or otherwise of the economic model. Therefore, two closely-related principles must be emphasised:
* the economic structure existing in any country operates within, and its success is dependent on its interaction with, the global economic and political context;
* the economic growth of any country depends on access to production-related knowledge, ie technology, which is largely dependent on interaction with ideas acquired from abroad.
Capitalist development cannot be understood without these factors. The transformation of Western Europe from the seat of Medieval stagnation to the cradle of the industrial revolution depended not only on the physical acquisition of gold from South America and slaves from Africa, but on the importation of the Islamic, Indian and Chinese knowledge which led to the use of modern arithmetic, printing, gunpowder, the compass, cotton spinning machinery and many other advances. The current re-emergence of China as a great power is dependent on a massive two-way transfer: of Western technology into China, and of goods cheaply manufactured by relatively low-paid labour from China to the West.
Similarly, neither the development nor the problems of the Soviet Union’s socialist industries are comprehensible purely by looking at the ‘Soviet model’, its principles and internal processes.
Illusion or reality?
Critics of the Soviet economic model have to reckon with some stubborn facts. During a succession of five-year plans, the USSR was transformed from a primitive, largely agricultural backwater, albeit one with an avowedly socialist government, into a superpower, second only to the United States in its international political influence, military capability and (without which these would have been impossible) industrial strength. By the 1960s, average life expectancy in the USSR had doubled, the Soviet Union had increased its literacy rate from less than 40% to 98.5% and was educating more higher education students per capita than Britain and West Germany. The USSR was even sending regular manned flights into space.
The anti-Soviet commentators who engage with this difficulty have two main responses: to imply that the USSR’s achievements were irrelevant or somehow illusory, and/or, to argue there was an intrinsic flaw within the Soviet system which made further progress impossible. Dr Charles N. Steele, a right-wing author from the USA, notes how influential the Soviet economic model was during the period of its operation:
“For most of the twentieth century, central economic planning was regarded as a path to rapid economic growth. It was also seen as a means of avoiding pitfalls of capitalistic development, such as pollution and income inequality.”
Among the reasons for this, he concedes, was that:
“…the Soviet economy was able to produce a sort of growth [my emphasis], which by some measures was spectacular, and was able to sustain itself for nearly seventy years… Industrial output clearly expanded enormously over the course of Soviet history.”
Steele goes on to describe the output of the economy of the Soviet Union as ‘apparent economic performance’ as if the goods which were produced or the buildings and infrastructure which were constructed had a doubtful or illegitimate existence.
Yet if one takes a visit to the republics of the former USSR, especially if one goes outside the tourist areas, the end products of this ‘apparent’ performance still seem real enough. A journey by mass transport usually involves locomotives, trams, buses, urban metro systems, airports and even aircraft made before 1989. The pylons carrying electricity into people’s homes and the power stations generating that electricity were erected in the same period. A high proportion of the flats and houses where people now live were built in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, providing hot and cold running water, indoor bathrooms and central heating for the first time for millions of families. The homes of many people are still equipped with the durable consumer products of the socialist era – locally-made furniture, carpets, refrigerators, TV sets. The majority of schools, universities, theatres and hospitals were built under the socialist system.
Postage stamp featuring the TU-154. This 1970s plane still dominates post-Soviet airspace
Another ‘illusion’ which the Soviet model was able to sustain- but which vanished when the system was abandoned - was that of economic security. Unemployment was almost zero; workers could retire between 50 and 60 on a reasonable pension, and a range of provisions including housing, heating, water, electricity, education at all levels, public transport, health services, sports and high quality cultural activities, were free or at nominal cost to Soviet citizens.
The Washington Post quoted the view of a writer for the ‘independent’ Yezhednevnyy Zhurnal Web site, that:
“Russians were mainly nostalgic for the illusion of stability that Brezhnev provided. ‘People remember that wonderful feeling of not having to worry about anything because it was all decided for you and you had simply to live peacefully, go to work and pick up your wages,’ he wrote. ‘Give the people peace and quiet, immerse them in nirvana and they will celebrate your 100th birthday with pleasure.’”
Why people ought to prefer the genuine, non-illusory stress and insecurity of life under capitalism was not explained.
From shovel to bulldozer
Former Clinton advisor Professor Paul Krugman does not express doubt about the reality of Soviet economic achievements. In a famous article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled ‘The myth of Asia’s miracle’, he noted that:
“…when Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the U.N. podium and declared, ‘We will bury you,’ it was an economic rather than a military boast. It is therefore a shock to browse through, say, issues of Foreign Affairs from the mid 1950s through the early 1960s and discover that at least one article a year dealt with the implications of growing Soviet industrial might…
“Illustrative of the tone of discussion was a 1957 article by Calvin B. Hoover. Like many Western economists, Hoover criticized official Soviet statistics, arguing that they exaggerated the true growth rate. Nonetheless, he concluded that Soviet claims of astonishing achievement were fully justified…
“These views were not considered outlandish at the time. On the contrary, the general image of Soviet central planning was that it might be brutal, and might not do a very good job of providing consumer goods, but that it was very effective at promoting industrial growth.”
The main thrust of Krugman’s article, which was published in 1994, was that the USA should not follow the example of certain Asian economies (the example he used was Singapore, which he described as “the economic twin of Stalin’s Soviet Union”) in using state planning to produce rapid economic growth.
Krugman argued that this state-led expansion is unsustainable because it is based, not on increasing efficiency (as allegedly occurs in market economies), but on the role of the state in mobilising more ‘inputs’ to add to the production process- more labour, more education, more machinery.
Other economists proffering the same theory but using different terminology claim that state-planned economies can grow ‘extensively’ but not ‘intensively’.
Krugman argues convincingly that there was no magic behind the industrial transformation of the USSR:
“The immense Soviet efforts to mobilize economic resources were hardly news. Stalinist planners had moved millions of workers from farms to cities, pushed millions of women into the labor force and millions of men into longer hours, pursued massive programs of education, and above all plowed an ever-growing proportion of the country's industrial output back into the construction of new factories. Still, the big surprise was that once one had taken the effects of these more or less measurable inputs into account, there was nothing left to explain. The most shocking thing about Soviet growth was its comprehensibility.”
Professor Krugman concedes that output per worker increased greatly in the USSR. However:
“Increases in labor productivity, however, are not always caused by the increased efficiency of workers. Labor is only one of a number of inputs; workers may produce more, not because they are better managed or have more technological knowledge, but simply because they have better machinery. A man with a bulldozer can dig a ditch faster than one with only a shovel, but he is not more efficient; he just has more capital to work with…
“Mere increases in inputs, without an increase in the efficiency with which those inputs are used--investing in more machinery and infrastructure--must run into diminishing returns; input-driven growth is inevitably limited.”
This is a useful example which illustrates not only the incoherence of Prof Krugman’s thoughts, but also the fallacy of free-market economics- the idea that the capitalist market releases some special factor which, aside from mere effort, education and machinery, makes everything more ‘efficient’. If (and no doubt this is true) better technological knowledge and better management would make the worker more proficient at using the bulldozer – or even the shovel – to provide better technological knowledge and better management would require the worker and the manager to have additional training; and education, as Krugman has conceded, is an input.
Further, the bulldozer is not simply better than the shovel; it is a more advanced piece of machinery, and to make a bulldozer is a more complex undertaking which requires a higher level of ‘know-how’ than making a shovel. And the bulldozer is not just more capital – a hundred more shovels would have been more capital, but that would not have resulted in any increase in production per worker.
To continue reading the article click here.
by Marcus Mulholland / December 31st 2006
The Soviet Model and the economic cold war
The way that Russia marked the 15th Anniversary of the end of the USSR, the final events of which took place between the 8th and 31st of December 1991, has caused consternation in the Western media.
The Washington Post cautioned:
“…don't look for parades in Moscow to celebrate the anniversary [of Gorbachev’s resignation on December 25th]. There will be no fireworks, no national commemoration of the epochal event of the last half of the 20th century.
“By contrast, the 100th birthday of the late Leonid Brezhnev last week touched off a wave of nostalgia for the old apparatchik with the bushy eyebrows. Wreaths and flowers were laid at his tomb in Red Square, conferences were held on his legacy, a street and park were renamed for him. A state television correspondent rhapsodized about how he ‘was quite a hit with the ladies.’ A poll showed that more than 60 percent of Russians saw the Brezhnev era in a positive light compared with 17 percent who did not.”
Under the headline “Nostalgia for USSR increases”, the US government foreign broadcasting service Radio Free Europe –Radio Liberty complained:
“The tumultuous course that Russia has followed ever since [the fall of the USSR] has generated, perhaps inevitably, a fervent desire among some to recast the past in a rosy hue.”
That “some” is the majority of Russians according to opinion polls. The RFE-RL report continued:
“The shelves of Moscow bookstores are stuffed with more than 500 new books on the life of Josef Stalin; more than half of them are apologist in tone.”
RFE-RL also noted a new assessment of the causes of the end of the Soviet Union:
“In 2006, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) released a fresh volume of its history, including an analysis of the Soviet collapse. The SVR dismisses the theory that the death of the USSR was historically predetermined. Instead, it depicts the downfall as a chance combination of adverse historical circumstances and the ‘failed policy’ of Gorbachev.
“The study notes efforts by the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the American intelligence community to weaken the USSR during the final stages of the Cold War. These efforts included the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative -- better known as ‘Star Wars’ -- that aimed at exhausting the Soviet economy by setting a new bar in military and defense parity. They also included restrictions of exports of Western hi-tech to Russia, the fall in oil prices, and U.S. support to anti-Soviet operations in Poland and Afghanistan.
“But, in the view of SVR analysts, it was neither Reagan's strategy nor special operations by the CIA that created the crisis in the Soviet system. In the words of the report, it only ‘aggravated’ it.”
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last president, had based his policies on the premise that the USSR’s economic difficulties – which he referred to as ‘stagnation’ – were caused by the Soviet Union’s socialist economic model: universal public ownership and the central planning of production. But as this system was dismantled and replaced by privatisation and the dominance of market forces, Russia and the other republics of the former USSR went into catastrophic industrial and social decline, which continued throughout the 1990s.
The failure of the capitalist reforms to deliver on the promises of economic dynamism and higher living standards (except for an elite minority) was not an experience confined to the former USSR and other ex-socialist states. The majority of South American countries, for example, underwent a process of de-industrialisation and mass impoverishment during the neo-liberal 1980s and 1990s, an experience which is fuelling the current movements on that continent for a turn towards socialism.
Consideration of both the achievements of the Soviet economy and of the difficulties which paved the way to its abolition is important not only for Russians making sense of their own history. As neo-liberal capitalism is increasingly challenged in the 21st Century, people searching for an alternative economic model are looking at current and historical examples and finding them problematic. Yugoslavia, whose industries were nationalised but allowed to compete with each other on a market basis, suffered from high unemployment and disparities in regional development; the USA assisted its economy as a counterweight to the USSR, and when US support was withdrawn its ‘market socialism’ could not survive. China, with its mixture of state and private investment, is becoming the industrial workshop of the world, importing production technology and energy, and exporting cheap manufactured goods - at the price of rising inequality, the impoverishment of the scores of millions who cannot find steady work in foreign or state-owned firms, and environmental degradation. Cuba, which has retained the main elements of its centrally-planned economic model, suffered badly in the early and mid 1990s, but is now growing strongly as it extends trade and investment links with Latin America and China.
When looking at the relevance of the Soviet experience, one has to contend with analyses, both from left and right, which isolate the economic policies followed in a particular country from other factors and attribute success or failure almost completely to the correctness or otherwise of the economic model. Therefore, two closely-related principles must be emphasised:
* the economic structure existing in any country operates within, and its success is dependent on its interaction with, the global economic and political context;
* the economic growth of any country depends on access to production-related knowledge, ie technology, which is largely dependent on interaction with ideas acquired from abroad.
Capitalist development cannot be understood without these factors. The transformation of Western Europe from the seat of Medieval stagnation to the cradle of the industrial revolution depended not only on the physical acquisition of gold from South America and slaves from Africa, but on the importation of the Islamic, Indian and Chinese knowledge which led to the use of modern arithmetic, printing, gunpowder, the compass, cotton spinning machinery and many other advances. The current re-emergence of China as a great power is dependent on a massive two-way transfer: of Western technology into China, and of goods cheaply manufactured by relatively low-paid labour from China to the West.
Similarly, neither the development nor the problems of the Soviet Union’s socialist industries are comprehensible purely by looking at the ‘Soviet model’, its principles and internal processes.
Illusion or reality?
Critics of the Soviet economic model have to reckon with some stubborn facts. During a succession of five-year plans, the USSR was transformed from a primitive, largely agricultural backwater, albeit one with an avowedly socialist government, into a superpower, second only to the United States in its international political influence, military capability and (without which these would have been impossible) industrial strength. By the 1960s, average life expectancy in the USSR had doubled, the Soviet Union had increased its literacy rate from less than 40% to 98.5% and was educating more higher education students per capita than Britain and West Germany. The USSR was even sending regular manned flights into space.
The anti-Soviet commentators who engage with this difficulty have two main responses: to imply that the USSR’s achievements were irrelevant or somehow illusory, and/or, to argue there was an intrinsic flaw within the Soviet system which made further progress impossible. Dr Charles N. Steele, a right-wing author from the USA, notes how influential the Soviet economic model was during the period of its operation:
“For most of the twentieth century, central economic planning was regarded as a path to rapid economic growth. It was also seen as a means of avoiding pitfalls of capitalistic development, such as pollution and income inequality.”
Among the reasons for this, he concedes, was that:
“…the Soviet economy was able to produce a sort of growth [my emphasis], which by some measures was spectacular, and was able to sustain itself for nearly seventy years… Industrial output clearly expanded enormously over the course of Soviet history.”
Steele goes on to describe the output of the economy of the Soviet Union as ‘apparent economic performance’ as if the goods which were produced or the buildings and infrastructure which were constructed had a doubtful or illegitimate existence.
Yet if one takes a visit to the republics of the former USSR, especially if one goes outside the tourist areas, the end products of this ‘apparent’ performance still seem real enough. A journey by mass transport usually involves locomotives, trams, buses, urban metro systems, airports and even aircraft made before 1989. The pylons carrying electricity into people’s homes and the power stations generating that electricity were erected in the same period. A high proportion of the flats and houses where people now live were built in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, providing hot and cold running water, indoor bathrooms and central heating for the first time for millions of families. The homes of many people are still equipped with the durable consumer products of the socialist era – locally-made furniture, carpets, refrigerators, TV sets. The majority of schools, universities, theatres and hospitals were built under the socialist system.
Postage stamp featuring the TU-154. This 1970s plane still dominates post-Soviet airspace
Another ‘illusion’ which the Soviet model was able to sustain- but which vanished when the system was abandoned - was that of economic security. Unemployment was almost zero; workers could retire between 50 and 60 on a reasonable pension, and a range of provisions including housing, heating, water, electricity, education at all levels, public transport, health services, sports and high quality cultural activities, were free or at nominal cost to Soviet citizens.
The Washington Post quoted the view of a writer for the ‘independent’ Yezhednevnyy Zhurnal Web site, that:
“Russians were mainly nostalgic for the illusion of stability that Brezhnev provided. ‘People remember that wonderful feeling of not having to worry about anything because it was all decided for you and you had simply to live peacefully, go to work and pick up your wages,’ he wrote. ‘Give the people peace and quiet, immerse them in nirvana and they will celebrate your 100th birthday with pleasure.’”
Why people ought to prefer the genuine, non-illusory stress and insecurity of life under capitalism was not explained.
From shovel to bulldozer
Former Clinton advisor Professor Paul Krugman does not express doubt about the reality of Soviet economic achievements. In a famous article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled ‘The myth of Asia’s miracle’, he noted that:
“…when Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the U.N. podium and declared, ‘We will bury you,’ it was an economic rather than a military boast. It is therefore a shock to browse through, say, issues of Foreign Affairs from the mid 1950s through the early 1960s and discover that at least one article a year dealt with the implications of growing Soviet industrial might…
“Illustrative of the tone of discussion was a 1957 article by Calvin B. Hoover. Like many Western economists, Hoover criticized official Soviet statistics, arguing that they exaggerated the true growth rate. Nonetheless, he concluded that Soviet claims of astonishing achievement were fully justified…
“These views were not considered outlandish at the time. On the contrary, the general image of Soviet central planning was that it might be brutal, and might not do a very good job of providing consumer goods, but that it was very effective at promoting industrial growth.”
The main thrust of Krugman’s article, which was published in 1994, was that the USA should not follow the example of certain Asian economies (the example he used was Singapore, which he described as “the economic twin of Stalin’s Soviet Union”) in using state planning to produce rapid economic growth.
Krugman argued that this state-led expansion is unsustainable because it is based, not on increasing efficiency (as allegedly occurs in market economies), but on the role of the state in mobilising more ‘inputs’ to add to the production process- more labour, more education, more machinery.
Other economists proffering the same theory but using different terminology claim that state-planned economies can grow ‘extensively’ but not ‘intensively’.
Krugman argues convincingly that there was no magic behind the industrial transformation of the USSR:
“The immense Soviet efforts to mobilize economic resources were hardly news. Stalinist planners had moved millions of workers from farms to cities, pushed millions of women into the labor force and millions of men into longer hours, pursued massive programs of education, and above all plowed an ever-growing proportion of the country's industrial output back into the construction of new factories. Still, the big surprise was that once one had taken the effects of these more or less measurable inputs into account, there was nothing left to explain. The most shocking thing about Soviet growth was its comprehensibility.”
Professor Krugman concedes that output per worker increased greatly in the USSR. However:
“Increases in labor productivity, however, are not always caused by the increased efficiency of workers. Labor is only one of a number of inputs; workers may produce more, not because they are better managed or have more technological knowledge, but simply because they have better machinery. A man with a bulldozer can dig a ditch faster than one with only a shovel, but he is not more efficient; he just has more capital to work with…
“Mere increases in inputs, without an increase in the efficiency with which those inputs are used--investing in more machinery and infrastructure--must run into diminishing returns; input-driven growth is inevitably limited.”
This is a useful example which illustrates not only the incoherence of Prof Krugman’s thoughts, but also the fallacy of free-market economics- the idea that the capitalist market releases some special factor which, aside from mere effort, education and machinery, makes everything more ‘efficient’. If (and no doubt this is true) better technological knowledge and better management would make the worker more proficient at using the bulldozer – or even the shovel – to provide better technological knowledge and better management would require the worker and the manager to have additional training; and education, as Krugman has conceded, is an input.
Further, the bulldozer is not simply better than the shovel; it is a more advanced piece of machinery, and to make a bulldozer is a more complex undertaking which requires a higher level of ‘know-how’ than making a shovel. And the bulldozer is not just more capital – a hundred more shovels would have been more capital, but that would not have resulted in any increase in production per worker.
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THE JFK ASSASSINATION II:CONSPIRACY PHOBIA ON THE LEFT
JFK's enemies in the CIA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere fixed on his refusal to provide air coverage for the Bay of Pigs, his unwillingness to go into Indochina with massive ground forces, his no-invasion guarantee to Krushchev on Cuba, his overtures for a rapprochement with Castro and professed willingness to tolerate countries with different economic systems in the Western hemisphere, his atmospheric-test-ban treaty with Moscow, his American University speech calling for reexamination of U.S. cold war attitudes toward the Soviet Union, his antitrust suit against General Electric, his curtailing of the oil-depletion allowance, his fight with U.S. Steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board's multibillion-dollar monopoly control of the nation's currency,3 his warm reception at labor conventions, and his call for racial equality. These things may not have been enough for some on the Left but they were far too much for many on the Right.
http://www.questionsquestions.net/documents2/conspiracyphobia.html
From Dirty Truths by Michael Parenti
(1996, City Lights Books)
(Pages 172 - 191)
THE JFK ASSASSINATION II:
CONSPIRACY PHOBIA
ON THE LEFT
Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.
Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon's downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as "a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery," the greatest financial crime in history.
Conspiracy or Coincidence?
Often the term "conspiracy" is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against "overheating" the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, "Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?" In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.
At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, "Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?" I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that "free-market reforms" are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, "more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies" (New York Times 11/25/95).
Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: "Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?" For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot - though they call it "planning" and "strategizing" - and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
Yet there are individuals who ask with patronizing, incredulous smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other about them? To which I respond, why would they not? This is not to say that every corporate and political elite is actively dedicated to working for the higher circles of power and property. Nor are they infallible or always correct in their assessments and tactics or always immediately aware of how their interests are being affected by new situations. But they are more attuned and more capable of advancing their vast interests than most other social groups.
The alternative is to believe that the powerful and the privileged are somnambulists, who move about oblivious to questions of power and privilege; that they always tell us the truth and have nothing to hide even when they hide so much; that although most of us ordinary people might consciously try to pursue our own interests, wealthy elites do not; that when those at the top employ force and violence around the world it is only for the laudable reasons they profess; that when they arm, train, and finance covert actions in numerous countries, and then fail to acknowledge their role in such deeds, it is because of oversight or forgetfulness or perhaps modesty; and that it is merely a coincidence how the policies of the national security state so consistently serve the interests of the transnational corporations and the capital-accumulation system throughout the world.
Kennedy and the Left Critics
In the winter of 1991-92 Oliver Stone's film JFK revived popular interest in the question of President John Kennedy's assassination. As noted in part I of this article, the mainstream media launched a protracted barrage of invective against the movie. Conservatives and liberals closed ranks to tell the public there was no conspiracy to murder the president for such things do not happen in the United States.
Unfortunately, some writers normally identified as on the Left have rejected any suggestion that conspiracy occurred. While the rightists and centrists were concerned about preserving the legitimacy of existing institutions and keeping people from seeing the gangster nature of the state, the leftists had different concerns, though it was not always clear what these were.
Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others challenge the notion that Kennedy was assassinated for intending to withdraw from Vietnam or for threatening to undo the CIA or end the cold war. Such things could not have led to his downfall, they argue, because Kennedy was a cold warrior, pro-CIA, and wanted a military withdrawal from Vietnam only with victory. Chomsky claims that the change of administration that came with JFK's assassination had no appreciable effect on policy. In fact, the massive ground war ordered by Johnson and the saturation bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos ordered by Nixon represented a dramatic departure from Kennedy's policy. On some occasions, Chomsky says he refuses to speculate: "As for what JFK might have done [had he lived], I have nothing to say." Other times he goes on to speculate that Kennedy would not have "reacted differently to changing situations than his close advisers" and "would have persisted in his commitment to strengthen and enhance the status of the CIA" (Z Magazine, 10/92 and 1/93).
The evidence we have indicates that Kennedy observed Cambodian neutrality and negotiated a cease-fire and a coalition government in Laos, which the CIA refused to honor. We also know that the surviving Kennedy, Robert, broke with the Johnson administration over Vietnam and publicly stated that his brother's administration had committed serious mistakes. Robert moved with the tide of opinion, evolving into a Senate dove and then a peace candidate for the presidency, before he too was murdered. The two brothers worked closely together and were usually of like mind. While this does not provide reason enough to conclude that John Kennedy would have undergone a transition comparable to Robert's, it still might give us pause before asserting that JFK was destined to follow in the direction taken by the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
In the midst of this controversy, Chomsky wrote a whole book arguing that JFK had no intention of withdrawing from Vietnam without victory. Actually, Kennedy said different things at different times, sometimes maintaining that we could not simply abandon Vietnam, other times that it ultimately would be up to the Vietnamese to fight their own war.1
One of Kennedy's closest aides, Kenneth O'Donnell, wrote that the president planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. According to Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who headed military support for the clandestine operations of the CIA, Kennedy dictated "the rich parts" of NSAM 263, calling for the withdrawal not only of all U.S. troops but all Americans, meaning CIA officers and agents too. Prouty reflects that the president thereby signed "his own death warrant." The Army newspaper Stars and Stripes ran a headline: "President Says - All Americans Out by 1965." According to Prouty: "The Pentagon was outraged. JFK was a curse word in the corridors."
Concentrating on the question of withdrawal, Chomsky says nothing about the president's unwillingness to escalate into a ground war. On that crucial point all Chomsky offers is a speculation ascribed to Roger Hilsman that Kennedy might well have introduced U.S. ground troops in South Vietnam. In fact, the same Hilsman, who served as Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, the officer responsible for Vietnam, noted in a long letter to the New York Times (1/20/92) that in 1963 "President Kennedy was determined not to let Vietnam become an American war - that is, he was determined not to send U.S. combat troops (as opposed to advisers) to fight in Vietnam nor to bomb North Vietnam." Other Kennedy aides such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and General Maxwell Taylor made the same point. Taylor said, "The last thing he [Kennedy] wanted was to put in our ground forces . . . I don't recall anyone who was strongly against [the recommendation], except one man and that was the President." Kennedy opposed the kind of escalation embarked upon soon after his death by Lyndon Johnson, who increased U.S. troops in Vietnam from 17,000 to approximately 250,000 and committed them to an all-out ground war.
Kennedy and the CIA
Chomsky argues that the CIA would have had no grounds for wanting to kill JFK, because he was a dedicated counterinsurgent cold warrior. Chomsky arrives at this conclusion by assuming that the CIA had the same reading of events in 1963 that he has today. But entrenched power elites are notorious for not seeing the world the way left analysts do. To accept Chomsky's assumptions we would need a different body of data from that which he and others offer, data that focuses not on the Kennedy administration's interventionist pronouncements and policies but on the more private sentiments that festered in intelligence circles and related places in 1963.
To offer a parallel: We might be of the opinion that the New Deal did relatively little for working people and that Franklin Roosevelt actually was a tool of the very interests he publicly denounced as "economic royalists." From this we might conclude that the plutocrats had much reason to support FDR's attempts to save big business from itself. But most plutocrats dammed "that man in the White House" as a class traitor. To determine why, you would have to look at how they perceived the New Deal in those days, not at how we think it should be evaluated today.
In fact, President Kennedy was not someone the CIA could tolerate, and the feeling was mutual. JFK told one of his top officials that he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" (New York Times, 4/25/66). He closed the armed CIA camps that were readying for a second Bay of Pigs invasion and took a number of other steps designed to bring the Agency under control. He fired its most powerful and insubordinate leaders, Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. He tried to reduce its powers and jurisdiction and set strict limits as to its future actions, and he appointed a high-level committee to investigate the CIA's past misdeeds.
In 1963, CIA officials, Pentagon brass, anti-Castro Cuban émigrés, and assorted other right-wingers, including FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, hated JFK and did not believe he could be trusted with the nation's future. They referred to him as "that delinquent in the White House." Roger Craig records the comments of numerous Dallas police officers who wanted to see Kennedy done away with. Several years ago, on a San Francisco talk show on station KGO, I heard a listener call in as follows: "this is the first time I'm saying this. I worked for Army intelligence. In 1963 I was in Japan, and the accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed because he was messing with the intelligence community. When word came of his death, all I could hear was delighted comments like 'We got the bastard'."
In his book First Hand Knowledge, CIA operative Robert Morrow noted the hatred felt by CIA officers regarding Kennedy's "betrayal" in not sending the U.S. military into the Bay of Pigs fiasco. One high-level CIA Cuban émigré, Eladio del Valle, told Morrow less than two weeks before the assassination: "I found out about it last night. Kennedy's going to get it in Dallas."2 Morrow also notes that CIA director Richard Helms, "knew that someone in the Agency was involved" in the Kennedy assassination, "either directly or indirectly, in the act itself - someone who would be in a high and sensitive position . . . Helms did cover up any CIA involvement in the presidential assassination."
Several years after JFK's murder, President Johnson told White House aide Marvin Watson that he "was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination" and that the CIA had something to do with it (Washington Post, 12/13/77). And Robert Kennedy repeatedly made known his suspicions that the CIA had a hand in the murder of his brother.
JFK's enemies in the CIA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere fixed on his refusal to provide air coverage for the Bay of Pigs, his unwillingness to go into Indochina with massive ground forces, his no-invasion guarantee to Krushchev on Cuba, his overtures for a rapprochement with Castro and professed willingness to tolerate countries with different economic systems in the Western hemisphere, his atmospheric-test-ban treaty with Moscow, his American University speech calling for reexamination of U.S. cold war attitudes toward the Soviet Union, his antitrust suit against General Electric, his curtailing of the oil-depletion allowance, his fight with U.S. Steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board's multibillion-dollar monopoly control of the nation's currency,3 his warm reception at labor conventions, and his call for racial equality. These things may not have been enough for some on the Left but they were far too much for many on the Right.
Left Confusions and the Warren Commission
Erwin Knoll, erstwhile editor of the Progressive, was anther left critic who expressed hostility toward the conspiracy thesis and Oliver Stone's movie in particular. Knoll admitted he had no idea who killed Kennedy, but this did not keep him from asserting that Stone's JFK was "manipulative" and provided false answers. If Knoll had no idea who killed Kennedy, how could he conclude that the film was false?
Knoll said Stone's movie was "a melange of fact and fiction" (Progressive, 3/92). To be sure, some of the dramatization was fictionalized - but regarding the core events relating to Clay Shaw's perjury, eyewitness reports at Dealey Plaza, the behavior of U.S. law officers, and other suspicious happenings, the movie remained faithful to the facts unearthed by serious investigators.
In a show of flexibility, Knoll allows that "the Warren Commission did a hasty, slipshod job" of investigation. Here too he only reveals his ignorance. In fact, the Commission sat for fifty-one long sessions over a period of several months, much longer than most major investigations. It compiled twenty-six volumes of testimony and evidence. It had the investigative resources of the FBI and CIA at its disposal, along with its own professional team. Far from being hasty and slipshod, it painstakingly crafted theories that moved toward a foreordained conclusion. From the beginning, it asked only a limited set of questions that seemed to assume Oswald's guilt as the lone assassin.
The Warren Commission set up six investigative panels to look into such things as Oswald's background, his activities in past years and on the day of the assassination, Jack Ruby's background, and his activities on the day he killed Oswald. As Mark Lane notes, there was a crying need for a seventh panel, one that would try to discover who killed President Kennedy. The commission never saw the need for that undertaking, having already made up its mind.
While supposedly dedicated to bringing the truth to light, the Warren Commission operated in secrecy. The minutes of its meetings were classified top secret, and hundred of thousands of documents and other evidence were sealed for seventy-five years. The Commission failed to call witnesses who heard and saw people shooting from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. It falsely recorded the testimony of certain witnesses, as they were to complain later on, and reinterpreted the testimony of others. All this took careful effort. A "hasty and slipshod" investigation would show some randomness in its errors. But the Commission's distortions consistently moved in the same direction in pursuit of a prefigured hypothesis.
Erwin Knoll talks disparagingly of the gullible U.S. public and says he "despises" Oliver Stone for playing on that gullibility. In fact, the U.S. public has been anything but gullible. It has not swallowed the official explanation the way some of the left critics have. Surveys show that 78 percent of the public say they believe there was a conspiracy. Both Cockburn in the Nation and Chomsky in Z Magazine dismiss this finding by noting that over 70 percent of the people also believe in miracles. But the fact that people might be wrong about one thing does not mean they are wrong about everything. Chomsky and Cockburn are themselves evidence of that.
In any case, the comparison is between two opposite things. Chomsky and Cockburn are comparing the public's gullibility about miracles with its unwillingness to be gullible about the official line that has been fed to them for thirty years. If anyone is gullible it is Alexander Cockburn who devoted extra column space in the Nation to support the Warren Commission's tattered theory about a magic bullet that could hit both Kennedy and Connolley while changing direction in mid-air and remaining in pristine condition.
Chomsky says that it is a "curious fact that no trace of the wide-ranging conspiracy appears in the internal record, and nothing has leaked" and "credible direct evidence is lacking" (Z Magazine, 1/93, and letter to me, 12/15/92). But why would participants in a conspiracy of this magnitude risk everything by maintaining an "internal record" (whatever that is) about the actual murder? Why would they risk their lives by going public? Many of the participants would know only a small part of the picture. But all of them would have a keen sense of the immensely powerful and sinister forces they would be up against were they to become too talkative. In fact, a good number of those who agreed to cooperate with investigators met untimely deaths. Finally, what credible direct evidence was ever offered to prove that Oswald was the assassin?
Chomsky is able to maintain his criticism that no credible evidence has come to light only by remaining determinedly unacquainted with the mountain of evidence that has been uncovered. There has even been a decision in a U.S. court of law, Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby, in which a jury found that President Kennedy had indeed been murdered by a conspiracy involving, in part, CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, and FBI informant Jack Ruby.4
Nixon advisor H.R. Haldeman admits in his memoir: "After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic coverup." And "In a chilling parallel to their coverup at Watergate, the CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy's assassination and the CIA."
Indeed, if there was no conspiracy, why so much secrecy and so much cover-up? If Oswald did it, what is there to hide and why do the CIA and FBI still resist a full undoctored disclosure of the hundreds of thousands of pertinent documents? Would they not be eager to reveal everything and thereby put to rest doubts about Oswald's guilt and suspicions about their own culpability?
The remarkable thing about Erwin Knoll, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others on the Left who attack the Kennedy conspiracy findings is they remain invincibly ignorant of the critical investigations that have been carried out. I have repeatedly pointed this out in exchanges with them and they never deny it. They have not read any of the many studies by independent researchers who implicate the CIA in a conspiracy to kill the president and in the even more protracted and extensive conspiracy to cover up the murder. But this does not prevent them from dismissing the conspiracy charge in the most general and unsubstantiated terms.
Let's Hear It for Structuralism
When pressed on the matter, left critics like Cockburn and Chomsky allow that some conspiracies do exist but they usually are of minor importance, a distraction from the real problems of institutional and structural power. A structural analysis, as I understand it, maintains that events are determined by the larger configurations of power and interest and not by the whims of happenstance or the connivance of a few incidental political actors. There is no denying that larger structural trends impose limits on policy and exert strong pressures on leaders. But this does not mean that all important policy is predetermined. Short of betraying fundamental class interests, different leaders can pursue different courses, the effects of which are not inconsequential to the lives of millions of people. Thus, it was not foreordained that the B-52 carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos conducted by Nixon would have happened if Kennedy, or even Johnson or Humphrey, had been president. If left critics think these things make no difference in the long run, they better not tell that to the millions of Indochinese who grieve for their lost ones and for their own shattered lives.
It is an either-or world for those on the Left who harbor an aversion for any kind of conspiracy investigation: either you are a structuralist in your approach to politics or a "conspiracist" who reduces historical developments to the machinations of secret cabals, thereby causing us to lose sight of the larger systemic forces. As Chomsky notes: "However unpleasant and difficult it may be, there is no escape from the need to confront the reality of institutions and the policies and actions they largely shape." (Z Magazine, 10/92).
I trust that one of the institutions he has in mind is the CIA. In most of its operations, the CIA is by definition a conspiracy, using covert actions and secret plans, many of which are of the most unsavory kind. What are covert operations if not conspiracies? At the same time, the CIA is an institution, a structural part of the national security state. In sum, the agency is an institutionalized conspiracy.
As I pointed out in published exchanges with Cockburn and Chomsky (neither of whom responded to the argument), conspiracy and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking at the whole picture. Conspiracies are a component of the national security political system, not deviations from it. Ruling elites use both conspiratorial covert actions and overtly legitimating procedures at home and abroad. They finance everything from electoral campaigns and publishing houses to mobsters and death squads. They utilize every conceivable stratagem, including killing one of their own if they perceive him to be a barrier to their larger agenda of making the world safe for those who own it.
The conspiracy findings in regard to the JFK assassination, which the movie JFK brought before a mass audience, made many people realize what kind of a gangster state we have in this country and what it does around the world. In investigating the JFK conspiracy, researchers are not looking for an "escape" from something "unpleasant and difficult," as Chomsky would have it, rather they are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy.
A structuralist position should not discount the role of human agency in history. Institutions are not self-generating reified forces. The "great continuities of corporate and class interest" (Cockburn's phrase) are not disembodied things that just happen of their own accord. Neither empires nor national security institutions come into existence in a fit of absent-mindedness. They are actualized not only by broad conditional causes but by the conscious efforts of live people. Evidence for this can be found in the very existence of a national security state whose conscious function is to recreate the conditions of politico-economic hegemony.
Having spent much of my life writing books that utilize a structuralist approach, I find it ironic to hear about the importance of structuralism from those who themselves do little or no structural analysis of the U.S. political system and show little theoretical grasp of the structural approach. Aside from a few Marxist journals, one finds little systemic or structural analysis in left periodicals including ones that carry Chomsky and Cockburn. Most of these publications focus on particular issues and events - most of which usually are of far lesser magnitude than the Kennedy assassination.
Left publications have given much attention to conspiracies such as Watergate, the FBI Cointelpro, Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, CIA drugs-for-guns trade, BCCI, and savings-and-loans scandals. It is never explained why these conspiracies are important while the FJK assassination is not. Chip Berlet repeatedly denounces conspiracy investigations while himself spending a good deal of time investigating Lyndon LaRouche's fraudulent financial dealings, conspiracies for which LaRouche went to prison. Berlet never explains why the LaRouche conspiracy is a subject worthy of investigation but not the JFK conspiracy.
G. William Domhoff points out: "If 'conspiracy' means that these [ruling class] men are aware of their interests, know each other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate and react to events and issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR [the Council for Foreign Relations], not to mention the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Council, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency." After providing this useful description of institutional conspiracy, Domhoff then conjures up a caricature that often clouds the issue: "We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world." Conspiracy theories "encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world."
To this simplistic notion Peter Dale Scott responds: "I believe that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to a few bad people but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed." In sum, national security state conspiracies are components of our political structure, not deviations from it.
Why Care About JFK?
The left critics argue that people who are concerned about the JFK assassination are romanticizing Kennedy and squandering valuable energy. Chomsky claims that the Nazi-like appeals of rightist propagandists have a counterpart on the Left: "It's the conspiracy business. Hang around California, for example, and the left has just been torn to shreds because they see CIA conspiracies . . . secret governments [behind] the Kennedy assassination. This kind of stuff has just wiped out a large part of the left" (Against the Current 56, 1993). Chomsky offers no evidence to support this bizarre statement.
The left critics fear that people will be distracted or misled into thinking well of Kennedy. Cockburn argues that Kennedy was nothing more than a servant of the corporate class, so who cares how he was killed (Nation 3/9/92 and 5/18/92). The left critics' hatred of Kennedy clouds their judgment about the politcal significance of his murder. They mistake the low political value of the victim with the high political importance of the assassination, its implications for democracy, and the way it exposes the gangster nature of the state.
In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a conservative militarist. Clemenceau once conjectured that if the man's name had not been Dreyfus, he would have been an anti-Dreyfusard. Does that mean that the political struggle waged around l'affaire Dreyfus was a waste of time? The issue quickly became larger than Dreyfus, drawn between Right and Left, between those who stood with the army and the anti-Semites and those who stood with the republic and justice.
Likewise Benigno Aquino, a member of the privileged class in the Philippines, promised no great structural changes, being even more conservative than Kennedy. Does this mean the Filipino people should have dismissed the conspiracy that led to his assassination as an event of no great moment, an internal ruling-class affair? Instead, they used it as ammunition to expose the hated Marcos regime.
Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated. If he had not been murdered, I doubt that Salvadoran history would have been much different. Does this mean that solidarity groups in this country and El Salvador should not have tried to make his murder an issue that revealed the homicidal gangster nature of the Salvadoran state? (I posed these questions to Chomsky in an exchange in Z Magazine, but in his response, he did not address them.)
Instead of seizing the opportunity, some left writers condescendingly ascribe a host of emotional needs to those who are concerned about the assassination cover-up. According to Max Holland, a scribe who seems to be on special assignment to repudiate the JFK conspiracy: "The nation is gripped by a myth . . . divorced from reality," and "Americans refuse to accept their own history." In Z Magazine (10/92) Chomsky argued that "at times of general malaise and social breakdown, it is not uncommon for millenarian movements to arise." He saw two such movements in 1992: the response to Ross Perot and what he called the "Kennedy revival" or "Camelot revival." Though recognizing that the audiences differ, he lumps them together as "the JFK-Perot enthusiasms." Public interest in the JFK assassination, he says, stems from a "Camelot yearning" and the "yearning for a lost Messiah."
I, for one, witnessed evidence of a Perot movement involving millions of people but I saw no evidence of a Kennedy revival, certainly no millenarian longing for Camelot or a "lost Messiah." However, there has been a revived interest in the Kennedy assassination, which is something else. Throughout the debate, Chomsky repeatedly assumes that those who have been troubled about the assassination must be admirers of Kennedy. In fact, some are, but many are not. Kennedy was killed in 1963; people who today are in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties - most Americans - were not old enough to have developed a political attachment to him.
The left critics psychologize about our illusions, our false dreams, our longings for Messiahs and father figures, or inability to face unpleasant realities the way they can. They deliver patronizing admonitions about our "conspiracy captivation" and "Camelot yearnings." They urge us not to escape into fantasy. They are the cognoscenti who guide us and out-left us on the JFK assassination, a subject about which they know next to nothing and whose significance they have been unable to grasp. Having never read the investigative literature, they dismiss the investigators as irrelevant or irrational. To cloak their own position with intellectual respectability, they fall back on an unpracticed structuralism.
It is neither "Kennedy worship" nor "Camelot yearnings" that motivates our inquiry, but a desire to fight back against manipulative and malignant institutions so that we might begin to develop a system of accountable rule worthy of the name democracy.
1 Kennedy's intent to withdraw is documented in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers ("Phased Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," vol. 2, pp. 160-200). It refers to "the Accelerated Model Plan . . .. for a rapid phase out of the bulk of U.S. military personnel" and notes that the administration was "serious about limiting the U.S. commitment and throwing the burden onto the South Vietnamese themselves." But "all the planning for phase-out . . . was either ignored or caught up in the new thinking of January to March 1964" (p. 163) - the new thinking that came after JFK was killed and Johnson became president.
2 Del Valle's name came up the day after JFK's assassination when Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade announced at a press conference that Oswald was a member of del Valle's anti-communist "Free Cuba Committee." Wade was quickly contradicted from the audience by Jack Ruby, who claimed that Oswald was a member of the leftish Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Del Valle, who was one of several people that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison sought out in connection with the JFK assassination, was killed the same day that Dave Ferrie, another suspect met a suspicious death. When found in Miami, del Valle's body showed evidence of having been tortured, bludgeoned, and shot.
3 The bankers of the Federal Reserve System print paper money, then lend it to the government at an interest. Kennedy signed an executive order issuing over $4 billion in currency notes through the U.S. Treasury, thus bypassing the Fed's bankers and the hundreds of millions of dollars in interest that would normally be paid out to them. These "United States Notes" were quickly withdrawn after JFK's assassination.
4 See Mark Lane, Plausible Denial; Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991). For testimony of another participant see Robert Morrow: First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992).
http://www.questionsquestions.net/documents2/conspiracyphobia.html
From Dirty Truths by Michael Parenti
(1996, City Lights Books)
(Pages 172 - 191)
THE JFK ASSASSINATION II:
CONSPIRACY PHOBIA
ON THE LEFT
Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.
Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon's downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as "a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery," the greatest financial crime in history.
Conspiracy or Coincidence?
Often the term "conspiracy" is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against "overheating" the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, "Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?" In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.
At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, "Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?" I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that "free-market reforms" are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, "more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies" (New York Times 11/25/95).
Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: "Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?" For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot - though they call it "planning" and "strategizing" - and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
Yet there are individuals who ask with patronizing, incredulous smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other about them? To which I respond, why would they not? This is not to say that every corporate and political elite is actively dedicated to working for the higher circles of power and property. Nor are they infallible or always correct in their assessments and tactics or always immediately aware of how their interests are being affected by new situations. But they are more attuned and more capable of advancing their vast interests than most other social groups.
The alternative is to believe that the powerful and the privileged are somnambulists, who move about oblivious to questions of power and privilege; that they always tell us the truth and have nothing to hide even when they hide so much; that although most of us ordinary people might consciously try to pursue our own interests, wealthy elites do not; that when those at the top employ force and violence around the world it is only for the laudable reasons they profess; that when they arm, train, and finance covert actions in numerous countries, and then fail to acknowledge their role in such deeds, it is because of oversight or forgetfulness or perhaps modesty; and that it is merely a coincidence how the policies of the national security state so consistently serve the interests of the transnational corporations and the capital-accumulation system throughout the world.
Kennedy and the Left Critics
In the winter of 1991-92 Oliver Stone's film JFK revived popular interest in the question of President John Kennedy's assassination. As noted in part I of this article, the mainstream media launched a protracted barrage of invective against the movie. Conservatives and liberals closed ranks to tell the public there was no conspiracy to murder the president for such things do not happen in the United States.
Unfortunately, some writers normally identified as on the Left have rejected any suggestion that conspiracy occurred. While the rightists and centrists were concerned about preserving the legitimacy of existing institutions and keeping people from seeing the gangster nature of the state, the leftists had different concerns, though it was not always clear what these were.
Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others challenge the notion that Kennedy was assassinated for intending to withdraw from Vietnam or for threatening to undo the CIA or end the cold war. Such things could not have led to his downfall, they argue, because Kennedy was a cold warrior, pro-CIA, and wanted a military withdrawal from Vietnam only with victory. Chomsky claims that the change of administration that came with JFK's assassination had no appreciable effect on policy. In fact, the massive ground war ordered by Johnson and the saturation bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos ordered by Nixon represented a dramatic departure from Kennedy's policy. On some occasions, Chomsky says he refuses to speculate: "As for what JFK might have done [had he lived], I have nothing to say." Other times he goes on to speculate that Kennedy would not have "reacted differently to changing situations than his close advisers" and "would have persisted in his commitment to strengthen and enhance the status of the CIA" (Z Magazine, 10/92 and 1/93).
The evidence we have indicates that Kennedy observed Cambodian neutrality and negotiated a cease-fire and a coalition government in Laos, which the CIA refused to honor. We also know that the surviving Kennedy, Robert, broke with the Johnson administration over Vietnam and publicly stated that his brother's administration had committed serious mistakes. Robert moved with the tide of opinion, evolving into a Senate dove and then a peace candidate for the presidency, before he too was murdered. The two brothers worked closely together and were usually of like mind. While this does not provide reason enough to conclude that John Kennedy would have undergone a transition comparable to Robert's, it still might give us pause before asserting that JFK was destined to follow in the direction taken by the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
In the midst of this controversy, Chomsky wrote a whole book arguing that JFK had no intention of withdrawing from Vietnam without victory. Actually, Kennedy said different things at different times, sometimes maintaining that we could not simply abandon Vietnam, other times that it ultimately would be up to the Vietnamese to fight their own war.1
One of Kennedy's closest aides, Kenneth O'Donnell, wrote that the president planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. According to Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who headed military support for the clandestine operations of the CIA, Kennedy dictated "the rich parts" of NSAM 263, calling for the withdrawal not only of all U.S. troops but all Americans, meaning CIA officers and agents too. Prouty reflects that the president thereby signed "his own death warrant." The Army newspaper Stars and Stripes ran a headline: "President Says - All Americans Out by 1965." According to Prouty: "The Pentagon was outraged. JFK was a curse word in the corridors."
Concentrating on the question of withdrawal, Chomsky says nothing about the president's unwillingness to escalate into a ground war. On that crucial point all Chomsky offers is a speculation ascribed to Roger Hilsman that Kennedy might well have introduced U.S. ground troops in South Vietnam. In fact, the same Hilsman, who served as Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, the officer responsible for Vietnam, noted in a long letter to the New York Times (1/20/92) that in 1963 "President Kennedy was determined not to let Vietnam become an American war - that is, he was determined not to send U.S. combat troops (as opposed to advisers) to fight in Vietnam nor to bomb North Vietnam." Other Kennedy aides such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and General Maxwell Taylor made the same point. Taylor said, "The last thing he [Kennedy] wanted was to put in our ground forces . . . I don't recall anyone who was strongly against [the recommendation], except one man and that was the President." Kennedy opposed the kind of escalation embarked upon soon after his death by Lyndon Johnson, who increased U.S. troops in Vietnam from 17,000 to approximately 250,000 and committed them to an all-out ground war.
Kennedy and the CIA
Chomsky argues that the CIA would have had no grounds for wanting to kill JFK, because he was a dedicated counterinsurgent cold warrior. Chomsky arrives at this conclusion by assuming that the CIA had the same reading of events in 1963 that he has today. But entrenched power elites are notorious for not seeing the world the way left analysts do. To accept Chomsky's assumptions we would need a different body of data from that which he and others offer, data that focuses not on the Kennedy administration's interventionist pronouncements and policies but on the more private sentiments that festered in intelligence circles and related places in 1963.
To offer a parallel: We might be of the opinion that the New Deal did relatively little for working people and that Franklin Roosevelt actually was a tool of the very interests he publicly denounced as "economic royalists." From this we might conclude that the plutocrats had much reason to support FDR's attempts to save big business from itself. But most plutocrats dammed "that man in the White House" as a class traitor. To determine why, you would have to look at how they perceived the New Deal in those days, not at how we think it should be evaluated today.
In fact, President Kennedy was not someone the CIA could tolerate, and the feeling was mutual. JFK told one of his top officials that he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" (New York Times, 4/25/66). He closed the armed CIA camps that were readying for a second Bay of Pigs invasion and took a number of other steps designed to bring the Agency under control. He fired its most powerful and insubordinate leaders, Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. He tried to reduce its powers and jurisdiction and set strict limits as to its future actions, and he appointed a high-level committee to investigate the CIA's past misdeeds.
In 1963, CIA officials, Pentagon brass, anti-Castro Cuban émigrés, and assorted other right-wingers, including FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, hated JFK and did not believe he could be trusted with the nation's future. They referred to him as "that delinquent in the White House." Roger Craig records the comments of numerous Dallas police officers who wanted to see Kennedy done away with. Several years ago, on a San Francisco talk show on station KGO, I heard a listener call in as follows: "this is the first time I'm saying this. I worked for Army intelligence. In 1963 I was in Japan, and the accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed because he was messing with the intelligence community. When word came of his death, all I could hear was delighted comments like 'We got the bastard'."
In his book First Hand Knowledge, CIA operative Robert Morrow noted the hatred felt by CIA officers regarding Kennedy's "betrayal" in not sending the U.S. military into the Bay of Pigs fiasco. One high-level CIA Cuban émigré, Eladio del Valle, told Morrow less than two weeks before the assassination: "I found out about it last night. Kennedy's going to get it in Dallas."2 Morrow also notes that CIA director Richard Helms, "knew that someone in the Agency was involved" in the Kennedy assassination, "either directly or indirectly, in the act itself - someone who would be in a high and sensitive position . . . Helms did cover up any CIA involvement in the presidential assassination."
Several years after JFK's murder, President Johnson told White House aide Marvin Watson that he "was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination" and that the CIA had something to do with it (Washington Post, 12/13/77). And Robert Kennedy repeatedly made known his suspicions that the CIA had a hand in the murder of his brother.
JFK's enemies in the CIA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere fixed on his refusal to provide air coverage for the Bay of Pigs, his unwillingness to go into Indochina with massive ground forces, his no-invasion guarantee to Krushchev on Cuba, his overtures for a rapprochement with Castro and professed willingness to tolerate countries with different economic systems in the Western hemisphere, his atmospheric-test-ban treaty with Moscow, his American University speech calling for reexamination of U.S. cold war attitudes toward the Soviet Union, his antitrust suit against General Electric, his curtailing of the oil-depletion allowance, his fight with U.S. Steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board's multibillion-dollar monopoly control of the nation's currency,3 his warm reception at labor conventions, and his call for racial equality. These things may not have been enough for some on the Left but they were far too much for many on the Right.
Left Confusions and the Warren Commission
Erwin Knoll, erstwhile editor of the Progressive, was anther left critic who expressed hostility toward the conspiracy thesis and Oliver Stone's movie in particular. Knoll admitted he had no idea who killed Kennedy, but this did not keep him from asserting that Stone's JFK was "manipulative" and provided false answers. If Knoll had no idea who killed Kennedy, how could he conclude that the film was false?
Knoll said Stone's movie was "a melange of fact and fiction" (Progressive, 3/92). To be sure, some of the dramatization was fictionalized - but regarding the core events relating to Clay Shaw's perjury, eyewitness reports at Dealey Plaza, the behavior of U.S. law officers, and other suspicious happenings, the movie remained faithful to the facts unearthed by serious investigators.
In a show of flexibility, Knoll allows that "the Warren Commission did a hasty, slipshod job" of investigation. Here too he only reveals his ignorance. In fact, the Commission sat for fifty-one long sessions over a period of several months, much longer than most major investigations. It compiled twenty-six volumes of testimony and evidence. It had the investigative resources of the FBI and CIA at its disposal, along with its own professional team. Far from being hasty and slipshod, it painstakingly crafted theories that moved toward a foreordained conclusion. From the beginning, it asked only a limited set of questions that seemed to assume Oswald's guilt as the lone assassin.
The Warren Commission set up six investigative panels to look into such things as Oswald's background, his activities in past years and on the day of the assassination, Jack Ruby's background, and his activities on the day he killed Oswald. As Mark Lane notes, there was a crying need for a seventh panel, one that would try to discover who killed President Kennedy. The commission never saw the need for that undertaking, having already made up its mind.
While supposedly dedicated to bringing the truth to light, the Warren Commission operated in secrecy. The minutes of its meetings were classified top secret, and hundred of thousands of documents and other evidence were sealed for seventy-five years. The Commission failed to call witnesses who heard and saw people shooting from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. It falsely recorded the testimony of certain witnesses, as they were to complain later on, and reinterpreted the testimony of others. All this took careful effort. A "hasty and slipshod" investigation would show some randomness in its errors. But the Commission's distortions consistently moved in the same direction in pursuit of a prefigured hypothesis.
Erwin Knoll talks disparagingly of the gullible U.S. public and says he "despises" Oliver Stone for playing on that gullibility. In fact, the U.S. public has been anything but gullible. It has not swallowed the official explanation the way some of the left critics have. Surveys show that 78 percent of the public say they believe there was a conspiracy. Both Cockburn in the Nation and Chomsky in Z Magazine dismiss this finding by noting that over 70 percent of the people also believe in miracles. But the fact that people might be wrong about one thing does not mean they are wrong about everything. Chomsky and Cockburn are themselves evidence of that.
In any case, the comparison is between two opposite things. Chomsky and Cockburn are comparing the public's gullibility about miracles with its unwillingness to be gullible about the official line that has been fed to them for thirty years. If anyone is gullible it is Alexander Cockburn who devoted extra column space in the Nation to support the Warren Commission's tattered theory about a magic bullet that could hit both Kennedy and Connolley while changing direction in mid-air and remaining in pristine condition.
Chomsky says that it is a "curious fact that no trace of the wide-ranging conspiracy appears in the internal record, and nothing has leaked" and "credible direct evidence is lacking" (Z Magazine, 1/93, and letter to me, 12/15/92). But why would participants in a conspiracy of this magnitude risk everything by maintaining an "internal record" (whatever that is) about the actual murder? Why would they risk their lives by going public? Many of the participants would know only a small part of the picture. But all of them would have a keen sense of the immensely powerful and sinister forces they would be up against were they to become too talkative. In fact, a good number of those who agreed to cooperate with investigators met untimely deaths. Finally, what credible direct evidence was ever offered to prove that Oswald was the assassin?
Chomsky is able to maintain his criticism that no credible evidence has come to light only by remaining determinedly unacquainted with the mountain of evidence that has been uncovered. There has even been a decision in a U.S. court of law, Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby, in which a jury found that President Kennedy had indeed been murdered by a conspiracy involving, in part, CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, and FBI informant Jack Ruby.4
Nixon advisor H.R. Haldeman admits in his memoir: "After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic coverup." And "In a chilling parallel to their coverup at Watergate, the CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy's assassination and the CIA."
Indeed, if there was no conspiracy, why so much secrecy and so much cover-up? If Oswald did it, what is there to hide and why do the CIA and FBI still resist a full undoctored disclosure of the hundreds of thousands of pertinent documents? Would they not be eager to reveal everything and thereby put to rest doubts about Oswald's guilt and suspicions about their own culpability?
The remarkable thing about Erwin Knoll, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others on the Left who attack the Kennedy conspiracy findings is they remain invincibly ignorant of the critical investigations that have been carried out. I have repeatedly pointed this out in exchanges with them and they never deny it. They have not read any of the many studies by independent researchers who implicate the CIA in a conspiracy to kill the president and in the even more protracted and extensive conspiracy to cover up the murder. But this does not prevent them from dismissing the conspiracy charge in the most general and unsubstantiated terms.
Let's Hear It for Structuralism
When pressed on the matter, left critics like Cockburn and Chomsky allow that some conspiracies do exist but they usually are of minor importance, a distraction from the real problems of institutional and structural power. A structural analysis, as I understand it, maintains that events are determined by the larger configurations of power and interest and not by the whims of happenstance or the connivance of a few incidental political actors. There is no denying that larger structural trends impose limits on policy and exert strong pressures on leaders. But this does not mean that all important policy is predetermined. Short of betraying fundamental class interests, different leaders can pursue different courses, the effects of which are not inconsequential to the lives of millions of people. Thus, it was not foreordained that the B-52 carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos conducted by Nixon would have happened if Kennedy, or even Johnson or Humphrey, had been president. If left critics think these things make no difference in the long run, they better not tell that to the millions of Indochinese who grieve for their lost ones and for their own shattered lives.
It is an either-or world for those on the Left who harbor an aversion for any kind of conspiracy investigation: either you are a structuralist in your approach to politics or a "conspiracist" who reduces historical developments to the machinations of secret cabals, thereby causing us to lose sight of the larger systemic forces. As Chomsky notes: "However unpleasant and difficult it may be, there is no escape from the need to confront the reality of institutions and the policies and actions they largely shape." (Z Magazine, 10/92).
I trust that one of the institutions he has in mind is the CIA. In most of its operations, the CIA is by definition a conspiracy, using covert actions and secret plans, many of which are of the most unsavory kind. What are covert operations if not conspiracies? At the same time, the CIA is an institution, a structural part of the national security state. In sum, the agency is an institutionalized conspiracy.
As I pointed out in published exchanges with Cockburn and Chomsky (neither of whom responded to the argument), conspiracy and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking at the whole picture. Conspiracies are a component of the national security political system, not deviations from it. Ruling elites use both conspiratorial covert actions and overtly legitimating procedures at home and abroad. They finance everything from electoral campaigns and publishing houses to mobsters and death squads. They utilize every conceivable stratagem, including killing one of their own if they perceive him to be a barrier to their larger agenda of making the world safe for those who own it.
The conspiracy findings in regard to the JFK assassination, which the movie JFK brought before a mass audience, made many people realize what kind of a gangster state we have in this country and what it does around the world. In investigating the JFK conspiracy, researchers are not looking for an "escape" from something "unpleasant and difficult," as Chomsky would have it, rather they are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy.
A structuralist position should not discount the role of human agency in history. Institutions are not self-generating reified forces. The "great continuities of corporate and class interest" (Cockburn's phrase) are not disembodied things that just happen of their own accord. Neither empires nor national security institutions come into existence in a fit of absent-mindedness. They are actualized not only by broad conditional causes but by the conscious efforts of live people. Evidence for this can be found in the very existence of a national security state whose conscious function is to recreate the conditions of politico-economic hegemony.
Having spent much of my life writing books that utilize a structuralist approach, I find it ironic to hear about the importance of structuralism from those who themselves do little or no structural analysis of the U.S. political system and show little theoretical grasp of the structural approach. Aside from a few Marxist journals, one finds little systemic or structural analysis in left periodicals including ones that carry Chomsky and Cockburn. Most of these publications focus on particular issues and events - most of which usually are of far lesser magnitude than the Kennedy assassination.
Left publications have given much attention to conspiracies such as Watergate, the FBI Cointelpro, Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, CIA drugs-for-guns trade, BCCI, and savings-and-loans scandals. It is never explained why these conspiracies are important while the FJK assassination is not. Chip Berlet repeatedly denounces conspiracy investigations while himself spending a good deal of time investigating Lyndon LaRouche's fraudulent financial dealings, conspiracies for which LaRouche went to prison. Berlet never explains why the LaRouche conspiracy is a subject worthy of investigation but not the JFK conspiracy.
G. William Domhoff points out: "If 'conspiracy' means that these [ruling class] men are aware of their interests, know each other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate and react to events and issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR [the Council for Foreign Relations], not to mention the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Council, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency." After providing this useful description of institutional conspiracy, Domhoff then conjures up a caricature that often clouds the issue: "We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world." Conspiracy theories "encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world."
To this simplistic notion Peter Dale Scott responds: "I believe that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to a few bad people but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed." In sum, national security state conspiracies are components of our political structure, not deviations from it.
Why Care About JFK?
The left critics argue that people who are concerned about the JFK assassination are romanticizing Kennedy and squandering valuable energy. Chomsky claims that the Nazi-like appeals of rightist propagandists have a counterpart on the Left: "It's the conspiracy business. Hang around California, for example, and the left has just been torn to shreds because they see CIA conspiracies . . . secret governments [behind] the Kennedy assassination. This kind of stuff has just wiped out a large part of the left" (Against the Current 56, 1993). Chomsky offers no evidence to support this bizarre statement.
The left critics fear that people will be distracted or misled into thinking well of Kennedy. Cockburn argues that Kennedy was nothing more than a servant of the corporate class, so who cares how he was killed (Nation 3/9/92 and 5/18/92). The left critics' hatred of Kennedy clouds their judgment about the politcal significance of his murder. They mistake the low political value of the victim with the high political importance of the assassination, its implications for democracy, and the way it exposes the gangster nature of the state.
In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a conservative militarist. Clemenceau once conjectured that if the man's name had not been Dreyfus, he would have been an anti-Dreyfusard. Does that mean that the political struggle waged around l'affaire Dreyfus was a waste of time? The issue quickly became larger than Dreyfus, drawn between Right and Left, between those who stood with the army and the anti-Semites and those who stood with the republic and justice.
Likewise Benigno Aquino, a member of the privileged class in the Philippines, promised no great structural changes, being even more conservative than Kennedy. Does this mean the Filipino people should have dismissed the conspiracy that led to his assassination as an event of no great moment, an internal ruling-class affair? Instead, they used it as ammunition to expose the hated Marcos regime.
Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated. If he had not been murdered, I doubt that Salvadoran history would have been much different. Does this mean that solidarity groups in this country and El Salvador should not have tried to make his murder an issue that revealed the homicidal gangster nature of the Salvadoran state? (I posed these questions to Chomsky in an exchange in Z Magazine, but in his response, he did not address them.)
Instead of seizing the opportunity, some left writers condescendingly ascribe a host of emotional needs to those who are concerned about the assassination cover-up. According to Max Holland, a scribe who seems to be on special assignment to repudiate the JFK conspiracy: "The nation is gripped by a myth . . . divorced from reality," and "Americans refuse to accept their own history." In Z Magazine (10/92) Chomsky argued that "at times of general malaise and social breakdown, it is not uncommon for millenarian movements to arise." He saw two such movements in 1992: the response to Ross Perot and what he called the "Kennedy revival" or "Camelot revival." Though recognizing that the audiences differ, he lumps them together as "the JFK-Perot enthusiasms." Public interest in the JFK assassination, he says, stems from a "Camelot yearning" and the "yearning for a lost Messiah."
I, for one, witnessed evidence of a Perot movement involving millions of people but I saw no evidence of a Kennedy revival, certainly no millenarian longing for Camelot or a "lost Messiah." However, there has been a revived interest in the Kennedy assassination, which is something else. Throughout the debate, Chomsky repeatedly assumes that those who have been troubled about the assassination must be admirers of Kennedy. In fact, some are, but many are not. Kennedy was killed in 1963; people who today are in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties - most Americans - were not old enough to have developed a political attachment to him.
The left critics psychologize about our illusions, our false dreams, our longings for Messiahs and father figures, or inability to face unpleasant realities the way they can. They deliver patronizing admonitions about our "conspiracy captivation" and "Camelot yearnings." They urge us not to escape into fantasy. They are the cognoscenti who guide us and out-left us on the JFK assassination, a subject about which they know next to nothing and whose significance they have been unable to grasp. Having never read the investigative literature, they dismiss the investigators as irrelevant or irrational. To cloak their own position with intellectual respectability, they fall back on an unpracticed structuralism.
It is neither "Kennedy worship" nor "Camelot yearnings" that motivates our inquiry, but a desire to fight back against manipulative and malignant institutions so that we might begin to develop a system of accountable rule worthy of the name democracy.
1 Kennedy's intent to withdraw is documented in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers ("Phased Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," vol. 2, pp. 160-200). It refers to "the Accelerated Model Plan . . .. for a rapid phase out of the bulk of U.S. military personnel" and notes that the administration was "serious about limiting the U.S. commitment and throwing the burden onto the South Vietnamese themselves." But "all the planning for phase-out . . . was either ignored or caught up in the new thinking of January to March 1964" (p. 163) - the new thinking that came after JFK was killed and Johnson became president.
2 Del Valle's name came up the day after JFK's assassination when Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade announced at a press conference that Oswald was a member of del Valle's anti-communist "Free Cuba Committee." Wade was quickly contradicted from the audience by Jack Ruby, who claimed that Oswald was a member of the leftish Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Del Valle, who was one of several people that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison sought out in connection with the JFK assassination, was killed the same day that Dave Ferrie, another suspect met a suspicious death. When found in Miami, del Valle's body showed evidence of having been tortured, bludgeoned, and shot.
3 The bankers of the Federal Reserve System print paper money, then lend it to the government at an interest. Kennedy signed an executive order issuing over $4 billion in currency notes through the U.S. Treasury, thus bypassing the Fed's bankers and the hundreds of millions of dollars in interest that would normally be paid out to them. These "United States Notes" were quickly withdrawn after JFK's assassination.
4 See Mark Lane, Plausible Denial; Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991). For testimony of another participant see Robert Morrow: First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992).
40 Years After- The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty- A crime that still demands response.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/061606.html
So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?
By Ray McGovern
October 5, 2007
Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat—Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again, and not only on Capitol Hill.
Nowhere is the Lobby’s power more clearly demonstrated than in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967 during the Six Day War:
--Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;
--The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and
--By that time, 34 of the Liberty’s crew had been killed and over 170 wounded.
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a 40-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire.
Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency destroyed voice tapes seen by many intelligence analysts, showing beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.
But the truth will out—eventually. All it took in this case is for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down off the hook for suppressing—even destroying—unimpeachable evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.
The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved.
A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled “New revelations in attack on American spy ship.” [For the full story, click here.]
To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: “Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story of deadly 1967 incident.”
Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today.
It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this damning story.
A Marine Stands Up
On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Missouri.
A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”
The study had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of “Leper!” were heard at the Atlantic. The monthly wasted no time in saying thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper-study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers.
Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.
I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That’s what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:
--First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called “neo-conservatives” running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the “enduring” military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the U.S. to dominate that part of the Middle East.
--Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the Lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter-bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could—literally—get away with murder.
I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the gentleman nearest me.
Ramrod straight he stood:
“Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir.”
Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.
“Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir.”
You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967.
He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest—and most easily identifiable—ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.
Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8.
After the air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty’s starboard hull.
Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame.
The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.
The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning.
Three were still alive; one of Lockwood’s shipmates dragged one up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch.
This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.
At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard—even after almost 40 years.
What Else We Know
John Crewdson’s meticulously documented article, together with the 57 pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in Body of Secrets and recent confessions by those who played a role in the cover-up, paint a picture that the surviving crew of the USS Liberty can only find infuriating.
The evidence, from intercepted communications as well as testimony, of Israeli deliberate intent is unimpeachable, even though the Israelis continue to portray it as just a terrible mistake.
Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, named by Admiral John S. McCain to “inquire into all the facts and circumstances.” [Yes, the father of presidential hopeful, Sen. John McCain.]
The fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out “cover-up.”
Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004, in which he described himself as “outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.’” Boston continued:
“The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew...Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded—a war crime...I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure to sink a ship of the U.S. Navy is a subject of speculation.
One view is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move.
James Bamford, in Body of Secrets, adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai.
The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware.
As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis involved and ask, no?
The important thing here is not to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation.
Other Indignities
Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed to award the Liberty’s skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the Medal of Honor....but not at the White House, and not by the president (as is the custom).
Rather, the Secretary of the Navy gave the award at the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River.
A naval officer involved in the awards ceremony told one of the Liberty crew, “The government is pretty jumpy about Israel...the State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal.”
Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived well enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.
Now that some of the truth has emerged more and more, others are showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent e-mail, a former CIA analyst-colleague shared:
“The chief of the analysts studying the Arab/Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests for confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed.”
Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open invitation to repetition in the future.
As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I was constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. This does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem Begin in 1982, when he was Israel’s prime minister. Rather he admitted publicly:
“In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response that could be used to justify an expansion of its borders.
Israel’s illegal 40-year control over and confiscation of land in the occupied territories and U.S. enabling support (particularly the one-sided support by the current U.S. administration) go a long way toward explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims “hate us.”
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the Steering Committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He spent some time in Israel and the West Bank this summer.
To
So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?
By Ray McGovern
October 5, 2007
Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat—Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again, and not only on Capitol Hill.
Nowhere is the Lobby’s power more clearly demonstrated than in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967 during the Six Day War:
--Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;
--The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and
--By that time, 34 of the Liberty’s crew had been killed and over 170 wounded.
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a 40-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire.
Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency destroyed voice tapes seen by many intelligence analysts, showing beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.
But the truth will out—eventually. All it took in this case is for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down off the hook for suppressing—even destroying—unimpeachable evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.
The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved.
A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled “New revelations in attack on American spy ship.” [For the full story, click here.]
To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: “Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story of deadly 1967 incident.”
Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today.
It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this damning story.
A Marine Stands Up
On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Missouri.
A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”
The study had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of “Leper!” were heard at the Atlantic. The monthly wasted no time in saying thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper-study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers.
Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.
I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That’s what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:
--First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called “neo-conservatives” running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the “enduring” military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the U.S. to dominate that part of the Middle East.
--Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the Lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter-bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could—literally—get away with murder.
I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the gentleman nearest me.
Ramrod straight he stood:
“Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir.”
Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.
“Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir.”
You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967.
He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest—and most easily identifiable—ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.
Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8.
After the air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty’s starboard hull.
Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame.
The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.
The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning.
Three were still alive; one of Lockwood’s shipmates dragged one up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch.
This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.
At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard—even after almost 40 years.
What Else We Know
John Crewdson’s meticulously documented article, together with the 57 pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in Body of Secrets and recent confessions by those who played a role in the cover-up, paint a picture that the surviving crew of the USS Liberty can only find infuriating.
The evidence, from intercepted communications as well as testimony, of Israeli deliberate intent is unimpeachable, even though the Israelis continue to portray it as just a terrible mistake.
Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, named by Admiral John S. McCain to “inquire into all the facts and circumstances.” [Yes, the father of presidential hopeful, Sen. John McCain.]
The fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out “cover-up.”
Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004, in which he described himself as “outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.’” Boston continued:
“The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew...Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded—a war crime...I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure to sink a ship of the U.S. Navy is a subject of speculation.
One view is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move.
James Bamford, in Body of Secrets, adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai.
The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware.
As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis involved and ask, no?
The important thing here is not to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation.
Other Indignities
Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed to award the Liberty’s skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the Medal of Honor....but not at the White House, and not by the president (as is the custom).
Rather, the Secretary of the Navy gave the award at the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River.
A naval officer involved in the awards ceremony told one of the Liberty crew, “The government is pretty jumpy about Israel...the State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal.”
Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived well enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.
Now that some of the truth has emerged more and more, others are showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent e-mail, a former CIA analyst-colleague shared:
“The chief of the analysts studying the Arab/Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests for confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed.”
Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open invitation to repetition in the future.
As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I was constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. This does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem Begin in 1982, when he was Israel’s prime minister. Rather he admitted publicly:
“In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response that could be used to justify an expansion of its borders.
Israel’s illegal 40-year control over and confiscation of land in the occupied territories and U.S. enabling support (particularly the one-sided support by the current U.S. administration) go a long way toward explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims “hate us.”
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the Steering Committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He spent some time in Israel and the West Bank this summer.
To
Noam Chomsky, happy parasite
"If you look at the things I write -- articles for Z Magazine, or books for South End Press, or whatever -- they are mostly based on talks and meetings and that kind of thing. But I'm kind of a parasite. I mean, I'm living off the activism of others. I'm happy to do it." - Noam Chomsky
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1019055.html
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1019055.html
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
A Shady History -Chomsky, Money, Linguistics and The Pentagon
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/655/chomsky.htm
A Roma proverb says "With one arse you cannot sit on two horses."
Weekly Worker 655 Thursday January 11 2007
"The Chomsky enigma
How is that a powerful critic of US imperialism has been regarded as a valued asset by the US military? "
This is an excellent question that should be asked in light of Chomsky's recent public disagreement (which I regard as an attack) with Venezuela's handling of the RCTV controversy and the world wide adulation he enjoys in many leftist circles. Back in 2005 Chris Knight, a Marxist professor of anthropology who is associated with the Weekly Worker in England wrote a lengthy paper that reviews Chomsky's early career and critiques Chomsky's scientific work. It's a must read for anyone who either loves or hates Chomsky or for anyone who wants to know more about the famous linguist. I've put the first part of Knight's paper here. To read the entire paper (which you ought to do) go to
http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/pub_knight_on_chomsky.pdf
Noam Chomsky ranks among the leading intellectual figures of modern times. He has changed the way we think about what it means to be human, gaining a position in the history of ideas - at least according to his supporters - comparable with that of Galileo, Descartes or Newton. Since launching his intellectual assault against the academic orthodoxies of the 1950s, he has succeeded - almost single-handedly - in revolutionising linguistics and establishing it as a modern science.
Such intellectual victories, however, have come at a cost. The stage was set for the “linguistics wars”1 when Chomsky published his first book. He might as well have thrown a bomb. “The extraordinary and traumatic impact of the publication of Syntactic structures by Noam Chomsky in 1957,” recalls one witness, “can hardly be appreciated by one who did not live through this upheaval.”2 From that moment, the battles have continued to rage.
‘Command and control’
How could a technical book on syntax have produced such dramatic effects? By his own admission, the author knew little about the world’s different languages. Indeed, he outraged traditional linguists by claiming he did not need to know. Chomsky was not interested in documenting linguistic diversity. Neither did he care about the relationship between language and other aspects of human thought or life. As far as his opponents could see, he was not really interested in linguistics at all. He seemed to be more interested in computers.
In 1955, Chomsky joined the ‘Research Laboratory of Electronics’ at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work was funded by the US military. He explains: “About half the institute’s budget was coming from two major military laboratories that they administered and of the rest, the academic side, it could have been something like 90% or so from the Pentagon. Something like that. Very high. So it was a Pentagon-based university. And I was at a military-funded lab.”3Chomsky clarified his activist convictions immediately on arrival. He recalls: “It was a military-financed laboratory, and people routinely went through security clearance procedures. I just refused. (We are asked to believe that someone who is denied a security clearance goes on to run a sensitive program for the US military, something I cannot swallow- Eugene Weixel) I know everyone thought it was kind of weird, because the only effect of it was that I missed out on free trips on military air transport and things like that.”4
He did not get the free rides, but otherwise encountered no problems.(Yeah, right, as we say in New York - EW) The preface to Syntactic structures concludes: “This work was supported in part by the USA army (Signal Corps), the air force (Office of Scientific Research, Air Research and Development Command) and the navy (Office of Naval Research); and in part by the National Science Foundation and the Eastman Kodak Corporation.”5
Chomsky and his supporters subsequently secured two large defence grants - one for a project based in MIT and the other for research undertaken in the University of California, Los Angeles. Aspects of the theory of syntax contains this acknowledgment: “The research reported in this document was made possible in part by support extended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Research Laboratory of Electronics, by the Joint Services Electronics Programs (US army, US navy and US air force) under contract No.DA36-039-AMC-03200(E); additional support was received from the US air force (Electronic Systems Division under contract AF19(628)-2487), the National Science Foundation (grant GP-2495), the National Institutes of Health (grant MH-04737-04) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (grant NsG-496).”6
Several questions arise. Why did Chomsky - an outspoken leftwing activist and anti-militarist - take the money? Secondly, what did the military think they were buying? Both questions are sharpened by the fact that MIT at this time had no tradition in linguistics. This confronts us with a third puzzle: why did the military not choose to invest in an institution with a proven record in this field? (To get the answer you'll have to go to the link, it's very interesting!- ew)Explaining his decision to choose MIT, Chomsky recalls that he felt in no mood to serve in an established department of linguistics. He needed somewhere where original thinking could be freely explored: “I had no prospects in a university that had a tradition in any field related to linguistics, whether it was anthropology or whatever, because the work that I was doing was simply not recognised as related to that field - maybe rightly. Furthermore, I didn’t have real professional credentials in the field. I’m the first to admit that. And therefore I ended up in an electronics laboratory. I don’t know how to handle anything more complicated than a tape recorder, and not even that, but I’ve been in an electronics laboratory for the last 30 years, largely because there were no vested interests there and the director, Jerome Wiesner, was willing to take a chance on some odd ideas that looked as if they might be intriguing. It was several years, in fact, before there was any public, any professional community with which I could have an interchange of ideas in what I thought of as my own field, apart from a few friends. The talks that I gave in the 1950s were usually at computer centres, psychology seminars and other groups outside of what was supposed to be my field.”7
Chomsky was to prove fortunate in his choice of institution. Its resources attracted able students who would soon contribute to his meteoric rise.8 The association with the military also sent out the right signal to his academic colleagues. Military folk don’t subsidise leftwing propaganda. If the Pentagon was paying up despite Chomsky’s well-known politics, it could only mean one thing: Chomsky’s science must surely be good.Since Chomsky himself benefited in such obvious ways, we are led to ask, what did the military stand to gain? Interviewed in 1971, colonel Edmund P Gaines explained: “The air force has an increasingly large investment in so called ‘command and control’ computer systems. Such systems contain information about the status of our forces and are used in planning and executing military operations. For example, defence of the continental United States against air and missile attack is possible in part because of the use of such computer systems. And, of course, such systems support our forces in Vietnam.“The data in such systems is processed in response to questions and requests by commanders. Since the computer cannot ‘understand’ English, the commanders’ queries must be translated into a language that the computer can deal with; such languages resemble English very little, either in their form or in the ease with which they are learned and used. Command and control systems would be easier to use, and it would be easier to train people to use them, if this translation were not necessary. We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.”9
Followers of Chomsky were by then engaged in just such a project at the University of California, Los Angeles, prompting Colonel Gaines to comment: “Of course, studies like the UCLA study are but the first step toward achieving this goal. It does seem clear, however, that the successful operation of such systems will depend on insights gained from linguistic research ...”
The colonel went on to express the air force’s “satisfaction” with UCLA’s work.10
The language machine
On the eve of the computer age, Chomsky’s Syntactic structures excited and inspired a new generation of linguists because it chimed in with the spirit of the times. Younger scholars were becoming impatient with linguistics conceived as the accumulation of empirical facts about linguistic forms and traditions. Chomsky promised simplification by reducing language to a mechanical ‘device’ whose design could be precisely specified. Linguistics was no longer to be tarnished by association with ‘unscientific’ disciplines such as anthropology or sociology. Instead, it would be redefined as the study of a ‘natural object’ - the specialised module of the brain which (according to Chomsky) was responsible for linguistic computation. Excluding social factors and thereby transcending mere politics and ideology, the reconstructed discipline would at last qualify as a science akin to mathematics and physics.
In science, according to Chomsky, less is more. If a theory is sufficiently powerful and simple, it should radically reduce the amount of knowledge needed to understand the relevant facts. As he explains, “... the amount that you have to know in a field is not at all correlated with the success of the field. Maybe it’s even inversely related because the more success there is, in a sense, the less you have to know. You just have to understand; you have to understand more, but maybe know less.”11
Syntactic structures infuriated established linguists - and delighted as many iconoclasts - because its message was that much of the profession’s work had been a waste of time. Why laboriously list and classify anthropological observations on the world’s variegated languages if a simplifying short cut can be found? In an ice-cool, starkly logical argument that magisterially brushed aside most current linguistic theory, Syntactic structures evaluated some conceivable ways of constructing the ultimate ‘language machine’:
“Suppose we have a machine that can be in any one of a finite number of different internal states ... the machine begins in the initial state, runs through a sequence of states (producing a word with each transition), and ends in the final state. Then we call the sequence of words that has been produced a ‘sentence’. Each such machine thus defines a certain language: namely the set of sentences that can be produced in this way.”12
As his argument unfolds, Chomsky rules out his initial crude design for the envisaged machine - clearly, it would not work. By a process of elimination, he then progressively narrows the range of designs which - on purely theoretical grounds - ought to work. Thrillingly, Chomsky opens up the prospect of discovering in effect ‘the philosopher’s stone’: the design specifications of a ‘device’ capable of generating grammatical sentences (and only grammatical ones), not only in English, but in any language spoken (or capable of being spoken) on earth.
Syntactic structures itself, as it happened, proved unequal to the extraordinary task. Aware of this, Chomsky in his next book proposed a completely different design for his machine - variously known as the Aspects model or as the standard theory.13 Two mathematical linguists, Stanley Peters and Robert Ritchie, explored its implications - only to find that the class of grammars captured by the new model was so all-encompassing as to be vacuous. A device built in such a way, they found, would be quite extraordinarily stupid. In fact, it would be unable to distinguish between (a) any conceivable list of strings of symbols (say, all the decimal places of pi, divided into arbitrary sequences and enumerated by the value of the products of their digits) and (b) a list of actual strings used by humans for expressing themselves in, say, English. A “not too far-fetched analogy,” as one critic put it, “would be a biological theory which failed to characterise the difference between raccoons and light bulbs.”14
Chomsky proceeded as if none of this had any bearing on his work. In a pre-emptive strike, he declared that “the gravest defect of the theory of transformational grammar is its enormous latitude and descriptive power”. Constraints would have to be introduced, even if that meant complicating the originally simple and elegant design. “Notice that it is often a step forward,” Chomsky observed, “… when linguistic theory becomes more complex.”15 In place of standard theory - or ST, as it was known - Chomsky now offered the extended standard theory, or EST.
By the late 1970s, however, still further changes seemed required, leading to the ‘revised extended standard theory’, or REST. Realising that this was still unsatisfactory, in 1981 Chomsky published his Lectures on government and binding, which swept away much of the apparatus of earlier transformational theories in favour of a much more complex approach.16 In its ‘principles and parameters’ incarnation, the device might arguably have seemed quite encouraging to colonel Gaines:
“We can think of the initial state of the faculty of language as a fixed network connected to a switch box; the network is constituted of the principles of language, while the switches are the options to be determined by experience. When the switches are set one way, we have Swahili; when they are set another way, we have Japanese. Each possible human language is identified as a particular setting of the switches - a setting of parameters, in technical terminology. If the research programme succeeds, we should be able literally to deduce Swahili from one choice of settings, Japanese from another, and so on through the languages that humans can acquire.”17
Without abandoning this extraordinary dream, Chomsky has since jettisoned most of the specifics in favour of an even more radical version, known as the Minimalist Programme.18 This offers the prospect of building the device in a breathtakingly simple way. Don’t re-invent the laws of nature - just make them work for you! Imagine how a snowflake grows, or how a living cell divides.
As Chomsky explains, “So, is cell division some horrible mess? Or is it a process that follows very simple physical laws and requires no genetic instructions at all because it’s just how the physics works? Do things break up into spheres to satisfy least energy requirements? If that were true, it would be sort of perfect; it’s a complicated biological process that’s going the way it does because of fundamental physical laws. So, beautiful process.”19
Is the creativity of language a “beautiful process” in this sense? Is it “perfect” like a snowflake? Chomsky suspects that it might be. If he is right, then assembling the language machine might be easier than we thought. Just let nature do the work! For Chomsky, the natural principle behind language is “recursion” - the embedding of one output in another of the same type.20 Among English speakers the story of ‘The house that Jack built’ is often used to illustrate this principle. According to Chomsky, it is all you need. He admits that specific languages do seem to present additional complications. But anomalies should not distract us - any more than we should be led astray by accidental imperfections in a crystal. To grow a crystal, we do not have to anticipate random imperfections in advance.
This new, bare-bones approach strikes many of Chomsky’s colleagues as an astonishing - and arguably refreshing - rupture in his long and remarkable career. In fact, it calls into question “almost everything” Chomsky has previously claimed: “My own view is that almost everything is subject to question, especially if you look at it from a minimalist perspective ... So, if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said government is a unifying concept, X-bar theory is a unifying concept, the head parameter is an obvious parameter, ECP, etc, but now none of these looks obvious. X-bar theory, I think, is probably wrong, government maybe does not exist.”2(Let's question Chomsky and who he is- EW)
Even the concept of “deep structure” has now vanished altogether. To appreciate what this means, imagine Newton abandoning ‘gravity’ or Marx abandoning ‘class’. As Chomsky demolishes the fundamentals of his former paradigm, it is difficult to discern quite what remains. But then how precisely is the language device to be built? Is the underlying idea - the principle of recursion - enough in itself? The US military has long since abandoned all hope of a workable machine.
Linguistics as physics
To his academic colleagues in the humanities and social sciences, Chomsky’s programme has caused predictable astonishment, exasperation and even outrage. How could Chomsky imagine it possible - even in principle - to construct a ‘device’ enabling scientists to ‘deduce’ the languages currently or historically spoken across the world?
In replying to such critics, Chomsky accuses them of not understanding science. To do science, he explains, “you must abstract some object of study, you must eliminate those factors which are not pertinent ...”22 The linguist - according to Chomsky - cannot study humans articulating their thoughts under concrete social or historical conditions. Instead, you must replace reality with an abstract model. “Linguistic theory,” Chomsky declared in 1965, “is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.”23
In an implicit reference to the great Swiss theoretician, Ferdinand de Saussure, he invokes the authority of “the founders of modern general linguistics” in support of this position, adding that “no cogent reason for modifying it has been offered.”24
Chomsky’s decision, then, is to work with a deliberately simplified model. In applying this, he envisages children acquiring language not through successive stages, but in an instant. The evolutionary emergence of language is also conceptualised as an instantaneous event.25 Lexical concepts (the literal meanings of words) are for Chomsky not historically determined: they were genetically installed when our species evolved. But what about modern concepts such as, say, ‘carburettor’ or ‘bureaucrat’? Did our distant Stone Age ancestors already have such concepts in their heads? Chomsky thinks they must have done.
After defending this bizarre idea in a general way, he elaborates: “Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as ‘carburettor’ and ‘bureaucrat’, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it. The same is often true of technical terms of science and mathematics, and it surely appears to be the case for the terms of ordinary discourse. However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.”26
‘Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the concept of a bicycle - he just never had occasion to use them!” comments the philosopher, Dan Dennett, adding that he and his colleagues find it hard not to burst out laughing at this point.27 Chomsky is here defending a strong form of the so-called ‘modular mind’ hypothesis, initially inspired by his own theory of an innate ‘language device’. Humans, according to this view, speak not for social reasons, but in expressing their individual genetic nature, speech being the autonomous output of a specialised computational mechanism - the ‘language organ’ - genetically ‘installed’ (Chomsky’s term) in the brain of every child on earth.
In his capacity as a natural scientist, Chomsky sees people as “natural objects”, their language a “part of nature”, while linguistics as a discipline “falls naturally within human biology”.28 However, this is not biology as normally understood. Discussing how language may have evolved, Chomsky suggests: “The answers may well lie not so much in the theory of natural selection as in molecular biology, in the study of what kinds of physical systems can develop under the conditions of life on earth ...”29
The apparently complicated features of grammar may be “simply emergent physical properties of a brain that reaches a certain level of complexity under the specific conditions of human evolution”.30 In an echo of the Manhattan project, Chomsky offers is own version of what might be termed the cognitive meltdown theory: “We know very little about what happens when 1010 neurons are crammed into something the size of a basketball, with further conditions imposed by the specific manner in which this system developed over time. It would be a serious error to suppose that all properties, or the interesting properties of the structures that evolved, can be ‘explained’ by natural selection.”31
But Chomsky has proposed a variety of scenarios. He appears equally happy with the speculation that “... a mutation took place in the genetic instructions for the brain, which was then reorganised in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry to install a faculty of language”.32 As if willing to try anything, he has recently suggested that language’s recursive structure may have emerged as a spandrel - an accidental by-product - of unspecified other developments connected with, say, navigation or mind-reading.33
For Chomsky, linguistics can aspire to the precision of physics because language itself is a “natural object”. As such, it approximates to a “perfect system”. Biologists, according to Chomsky, do not expect perfection, which is a distinctive hallmark of physics. He explains: “In the study of the inorganic world, for mysterious reasons, it has been a valuable heuristic to assume that things are very elegant and beautiful.”34 If it is to succeed in connecting sounds with meanings, language must solve a number of technical problems. In an apparent nod toward creationism or ‘intelligent design’, Chomsky continues:
“If a divine architect were faced with the problem of designing something to satisfy these conditions, would actual human language be one of the candidates, or close to it? Recent work suggests that language is surprisingly ‘perfect’ in this sense ... Insofar as that is true, language seems unlike other objects of the biological world, which are typically a rather messy solution to some class of problems, given the physical constraints and the materials that history and accident have made available.”35
Language, according to Chomsky, cannot just have evolved. It lacks the untidiness we would expect of an accumulation of accidents made good by evolutionary ‘tinkering’. Characterised by beauty bordering on perfection, it cannot have arisen in the normal Darwinian way.
Who benefits?
It is perhaps easy to understand why computer engineers might find it useful to treat language as a mechanical ‘device’. If, say, the aim were to construct an electronic command-and-control system for military use, then traditional linguistics would clearly be inadequate. The requirement would be for a version of language stripped free of meanings in any human or cultural sense - stripped of metaphor, poetry, humour, politics or anything else not accessible to a machine.
But military figures such as colonel Gaines were not the only people who in the 1960s hoped to benefit from the new approach. What of Chomsky’s other institutional sources of support? And what about his own fiercely anti-militarist politics? How did an anti-capitalist revolution connect with the ‘revolution’ Chomsky was inaugurating within linguistics? Indeed, can the two sides of Chomsky’s output be reconciled at all? Was the young anarchist tailoring his theories to meet the requirements of his military sponsors - forcing us, perhaps, to question the sincerity of his anarcho-syndicalist commitments? Or did he believe he was taking the money - refusing to let this influence his scientific results - in order to secure the best possible position from which to promote the anarchist cause?
(If you've been interested up to this point, well, you've got to read the entire paper- EW)
http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/pub_knight_on_chomsky.pdf
(Okay I couldn't resist adding this on on October 6, 2007, jumping ahead to where Knight solves the Chomsky enigma)-
1.11 Chomsky in political perspective
Let us retrace our steps. Consider Chomsky the young anarchist, faced with the problem of breaking into academia. Given his outspoken views, how was he to overcome the many obstacles that would naturally be placed in his way?
It would appear that Chomsky found a way of turning his apparent political handicap into an advantage. Financially and institutionally, the requirement – he knew – was for an agenda the precise reverse of anarchosyndicalism. The 1950s represented the dawn of the new computer age. Key intellectual and technical developments were being funded by the American military. These and other corporate forces required a new version of cognitive and linguistic science, having little in common with what they saw as Marxist-inspired versions of sociology or anthropology. What was needed was a psychology and a linguistics completely stripped of social content or political awareness – a version of these disciplines rigorously re-engineered and fine-tuned to serve the computer age in the name of ‘cognitive revolution’. But how could the left’s ‘natural’ ascendancy in these disciplines be overturned? Corporate America needed someone of intellectual integrity and – preferably – of unimpeachable political integrity to act as its standard-bearer in organizing the necessary coup. Ideally, this person should not only be ‘left-wing’ in an ordinary, run-of-the-mill sense. The perfect candidate would be sufficiently left-wing to outflank everyone else in the race. Chomsky in 1957 was the right person arriving in the right position at exactly the right time.
In the event, Chomsky forged an anti-behaviourist coalition linking much of the academic left with those corporate forces – including the military – who were underwriting the development of the nascent computer industry. It was an unholy alliance, and as such was destined to fall apart once the behaviourist enemy had been overthrown. Jerome Bruner (1990: 2-3) recalls:
‘Now let me tell you first what I and my friends thought the revolution was about back there in the late 1950s. It was, we thought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept in psychology — not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behaviour, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning. ....we were not out to “reform” behaviourism, but to replace it’.
‘The cognitive revolution as originally conceived’, Bruner (1990: 3) continues, ‘virtually required that psychology join forces with anthropology and linguistics, philosophy and history, even with the discipline of law’.
Once behaviourism had been toppled, however, Chomsky clarified that this was not his vision at all. As Bruner (1990: 40) explains:
‘Very early on.....emphasis began shifting from ‘meaning’ to ‘information’, from the construction of meaning to the processing of information. These are profoundly different matters. The key factor in the shift was the introduction of computation as the ruling metaphor and of computability as a necessary criterion of a good theoretical model’.
Information, as Bruner(1990: 4) points out, is a term designed to be indifferent with respect to meaning. In computational terms, information comprises an already precoded message in the system. Meaning is preassigned to messages. It is not an outcome of computation nor is it relevant to computation save in the arbitrary sense of assignment:
‘According to classic information theory, a message is informative if it reduces alternative choices. This implies a code of established possible choices. The categories of possibility and the instances they comprise are processed according to the “syntax” of the system, its possible moves. Insofar as information in this dispensation can deal with meaning it is in the dictionary sense only: accessing stored lexical information according to a coded address.’
In integrating his new version of linguistics with computer science, Chomsky dispensed with concepts such as ‘intention’, ‘context’ and ‘meaning’ in favour of an insistent and relentless focus on ‘syntax’. It was Alan Turing’s great discovery that machines can be designed to evaluate any inference that is ‘formally valid’ – that is, valid by virtue of the internal syntax of the pre-installed code. No machine can genuinely talk, because speaking entails understanding what other speakers may have in mind as they draw on their memories and experiences of themselves and others on the biological, social, cultural, religious and other levels inhabited by human minds. Machines are and always will be hopeless at passing themselves off as humans. But, as Fodor (2000: 13) points out,
‘you can build them so that they are quite good at detecting and responding to syntactic properties and relations. That, in turn, is because the syntax of a sentence reduces to the identity and arrangement of its elementary parts, and, at least in the artificial languages that machines compute in, these elementary parts and arrangements can be exhaustively itemized, and the machine specifically designed to detect them’.
Such a system, however, cannot cope with vagueness, with polysemy or with metaphoric or connotative connections – in other words, with the stuff of human language. Consequently, Chomsky and his followers simply stopped talking of meaning – replacing the idea with “computability” instead. Linguists now spoke not of intention, belief or agency but of mechanical ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ – notions not too different, as Bruner (1990: 7) points out, from the ‘stimuli’ and ‘responses’ of the behaviourists who were supposed to have been overthrown.
Writing of Chomsky’s overall scientific contribution, Geoffrey Leech (1983: 3) comments:
‘It has the advantage of maintaining the integrity of linguistics, as within a walled city, away from the contaminating influences of use and context. But many have grave doubts about the narrowness of this paradigm’s definition of language, and about the high degree of abstraction and idealization of data which it requires’.
Child-language specialist Elizabeth Bates (1984) complains of the ‘scorched earth’ policy deployed by Chomsky and his allies to keep the opposition at bay.
While the overthrow of behavourism was widely celebrated, the ‘revolution’ intended by Chomsky’s corporate sponsors had nothing to do with the establishment of a science of human meaning. As these forces championed Chomsky in steering the ‘cognitive revolution’ along channels narrowly defined by their specific commercial and political goals, the intellectuals who had supported generativism ‘from the left’ felt betrayed. Had they been able to unite, they might have comprised a formidable intellectual and political force. In the event, however, Chomsky’s politics served him and his sponsors well. Left-wing resistance to Chomsky’s science was always tempered by respect for his moral and political integrity. How do you attack an ‘enemy’ who is on your own side? The ambivalence ended up simply paralysing the opposition, whose splits and disagreements left Chomsky with a free hand — which he used quite mercilessly. It is fair to say that most of those linguists and other creative thinkers whose contributions were excluded by Chomsky had political sympathies not vastly different from his own. Together, they could have mounted an impressive intellectual defence of the unity and autonomy of science. In the event, it was Chomsky’s defection that sealed their fate. Alienated from the academic mainstream, this talented individual was in effect selected by corporate America to do an extraordinary double-act, playing the role of chief enforcer for the new corporate science at home – while using this very status to gain a hearing as the most eloquent academic critic of U.S. policies elsewhere across the globe.
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Notes
1. RA Harris The linguistics wars New York 1993.
2. H Maclay, ‘Linguistics: overview’, in D Steinberg and L Jakobovits (eds) Semantics Cambridge 1971, p163.
3. N Chomsky Class warfare (interviews with David Barsamian), London 1996, p102.
4. Op cit p98.
5. N Chomsky Syntactic structures The Hague 1957, p1.
6. N Chomsky Aspects of the theory of syntax Cambridge, Mass 1965, piv.
7. Interview in J Peck (ed) The Chomsky reader London 1988, pp15-16.
8. See FJ Newmeyer The politics of linguistics Chicago 1986, p84.
9. Ibid pp85-86. This source of funding was initially very helpful to Chomsky, but dried up completely in the late 1960s. Had the military been expecting from Chomsky a real ‘command and control’ machine, they would have been disappointed - he could not deliver anything workable and anyway was not interested. What corporate America got from Chomsky were long-term institutional gains in terms of how science was defined, not devices which could be manufactured or patented.
10. Ibid.
11. Interview in J Peck (ed) The Chomsky reader London 1988, p17.
12. N Chomsky Syntactic structures The Hague 1957, p18.
13. N Chomsky Aspects of the theory of syntax Cambridge, Mass 1965.
14. E Bach, ‘Explanatory inadequacy’, in D Cohen (ed) Explaining linguistic phenomena New York 1974, p158. See also S Peters and R Ritchie, ‘On restricting the base component of transformational grammar Information and Control 18: 493-501, 1971; S Peters and R Ritchie, ‘On the generative power of transformational grammars’ Information Sciences 6: 49-83, 1973; S Peters and R Ritchie, ‘Non-filtering and local-filtering transformational grammars’, in J Hintikka et al (eds) Approaches to natural language Dordrecht 1973, pp180-94.
15. N Chomsky Studies on semantics in generative grammar The Hague 1972, pp125-26. Since Chomsky denies the relevance of Peters-Ritchie, it is worth quoting Frederick Newmeyer, then a strong supporter of Chomsky: “The Peters-Ritchie findings,” he writes, “served as silent witness to almost all of the significant work in syntax in the 1970s. There was hardly a paper written that did not appeal to the increased restrictiveness of the theory that followed as a consequence of the adoption of the [Peters-Ritchie] proposals ... Constraint after constraint was put forward to limit the power of the grammar” (FJ Newmeyer Linguistic theory in America New York 1980, p176). For discussion, see RA Harris The linguistics wars New York 1993, p293n.
16. N Chomsky Lectures on government and binding Dordrecht 1981.
17. N Chomsky New horizons in the study of language and mind Cambridge 2000, p8.
18. Outlined in N Chomsky The minimalist programme Cambridge, Mass 1995.
19. N Chomsky On nature and language Cambridge 2002, p103.
20. MD Hauser, N Chomsky and W Tecumseh Fitch, ‘The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?’ Science 298, 1569-1579, 2002.
21. N Chomsky On nature and language Cambridge 2002, p151.
22. N Chomsky Language and responsibility (interviews with Mitsou Ronat), New York 1979, p57.
23. N Chomsky Aspects of the theory of syntax Cambridge, Mass 1965, pp3-4.
24. Ibid.
25. N Chomsky On nature and language Cambridge 2002, p148.
26. N Chomsky New horizons in the study of language and mind Cambridge 2000, pp64-66.
27. D Dennett Consciousness explained London 1991, pp192-93n.
28. N Chomsky Reflections of language London 1976, pp186, 123.
29. N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge Cambridge, Mass 1988, p167.
30. N Chomsky, ‘Linguistics and cognitive science: problems and mysteries’, in A Kasher (ed) The Chomskyan turn: generative linguistics, philosophy, mathematics and psychology Oxford 1991, p50.
31. N Chomsky Reflections on language London 1976, p59.
32. N Chomsky ‘Language and mind: current thoughts on ancient problems’ Pesquisa Linguistica 3, 4, 1998, p17.
33. MD Hauser, N Chomsky and W Tecumseh Fitch, ‘The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298, 1569-1579, 2002.
34. N Chomsky New horizons in the study of language and mind Cambridge 2000, pp106-33.
35. N Chomsky Powers and prospects: reflections on human nature and the social order London 1996, p30.
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A Roma proverb says "With one arse you cannot sit on two horses."
Weekly Worker 655 Thursday January 11 2007
"The Chomsky enigma
How is that a powerful critic of US imperialism has been regarded as a valued asset by the US military? "
This is an excellent question that should be asked in light of Chomsky's recent public disagreement (which I regard as an attack) with Venezuela's handling of the RCTV controversy and the world wide adulation he enjoys in many leftist circles. Back in 2005 Chris Knight, a Marxist professor of anthropology who is associated with the Weekly Worker in England wrote a lengthy paper that reviews Chomsky's early career and critiques Chomsky's scientific work. It's a must read for anyone who either loves or hates Chomsky or for anyone who wants to know more about the famous linguist. I've put the first part of Knight's paper here. To read the entire paper (which you ought to do) go to
http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/pub_knight_on_chomsky.pdf
Noam Chomsky ranks among the leading intellectual figures of modern times. He has changed the way we think about what it means to be human, gaining a position in the history of ideas - at least according to his supporters - comparable with that of Galileo, Descartes or Newton. Since launching his intellectual assault against the academic orthodoxies of the 1950s, he has succeeded - almost single-handedly - in revolutionising linguistics and establishing it as a modern science.
Such intellectual victories, however, have come at a cost. The stage was set for the “linguistics wars”1 when Chomsky published his first book. He might as well have thrown a bomb. “The extraordinary and traumatic impact of the publication of Syntactic structures by Noam Chomsky in 1957,” recalls one witness, “can hardly be appreciated by one who did not live through this upheaval.”2 From that moment, the battles have continued to rage.
‘Command and control’
How could a technical book on syntax have produced such dramatic effects? By his own admission, the author knew little about the world’s different languages. Indeed, he outraged traditional linguists by claiming he did not need to know. Chomsky was not interested in documenting linguistic diversity. Neither did he care about the relationship between language and other aspects of human thought or life. As far as his opponents could see, he was not really interested in linguistics at all. He seemed to be more interested in computers.
In 1955, Chomsky joined the ‘Research Laboratory of Electronics’ at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work was funded by the US military. He explains: “About half the institute’s budget was coming from two major military laboratories that they administered and of the rest, the academic side, it could have been something like 90% or so from the Pentagon. Something like that. Very high. So it was a Pentagon-based university. And I was at a military-funded lab.”3Chomsky clarified his activist convictions immediately on arrival. He recalls: “It was a military-financed laboratory, and people routinely went through security clearance procedures. I just refused. (We are asked to believe that someone who is denied a security clearance goes on to run a sensitive program for the US military, something I cannot swallow- Eugene Weixel) I know everyone thought it was kind of weird, because the only effect of it was that I missed out on free trips on military air transport and things like that.”4
He did not get the free rides, but otherwise encountered no problems.(Yeah, right, as we say in New York - EW) The preface to Syntactic structures concludes: “This work was supported in part by the USA army (Signal Corps), the air force (Office of Scientific Research, Air Research and Development Command) and the navy (Office of Naval Research); and in part by the National Science Foundation and the Eastman Kodak Corporation.”5
Chomsky and his supporters subsequently secured two large defence grants - one for a project based in MIT and the other for research undertaken in the University of California, Los Angeles. Aspects of the theory of syntax contains this acknowledgment: “The research reported in this document was made possible in part by support extended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Research Laboratory of Electronics, by the Joint Services Electronics Programs (US army, US navy and US air force) under contract No.DA36-039-AMC-03200(E); additional support was received from the US air force (Electronic Systems Division under contract AF19(628)-2487), the National Science Foundation (grant GP-2495), the National Institutes of Health (grant MH-04737-04) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (grant NsG-496).”6
Several questions arise. Why did Chomsky - an outspoken leftwing activist and anti-militarist - take the money? Secondly, what did the military think they were buying? Both questions are sharpened by the fact that MIT at this time had no tradition in linguistics. This confronts us with a third puzzle: why did the military not choose to invest in an institution with a proven record in this field? (To get the answer you'll have to go to the link, it's very interesting!- ew)Explaining his decision to choose MIT, Chomsky recalls that he felt in no mood to serve in an established department of linguistics. He needed somewhere where original thinking could be freely explored: “I had no prospects in a university that had a tradition in any field related to linguistics, whether it was anthropology or whatever, because the work that I was doing was simply not recognised as related to that field - maybe rightly. Furthermore, I didn’t have real professional credentials in the field. I’m the first to admit that. And therefore I ended up in an electronics laboratory. I don’t know how to handle anything more complicated than a tape recorder, and not even that, but I’ve been in an electronics laboratory for the last 30 years, largely because there were no vested interests there and the director, Jerome Wiesner, was willing to take a chance on some odd ideas that looked as if they might be intriguing. It was several years, in fact, before there was any public, any professional community with which I could have an interchange of ideas in what I thought of as my own field, apart from a few friends. The talks that I gave in the 1950s were usually at computer centres, psychology seminars and other groups outside of what was supposed to be my field.”7
Chomsky was to prove fortunate in his choice of institution. Its resources attracted able students who would soon contribute to his meteoric rise.8 The association with the military also sent out the right signal to his academic colleagues. Military folk don’t subsidise leftwing propaganda. If the Pentagon was paying up despite Chomsky’s well-known politics, it could only mean one thing: Chomsky’s science must surely be good.Since Chomsky himself benefited in such obvious ways, we are led to ask, what did the military stand to gain? Interviewed in 1971, colonel Edmund P Gaines explained: “The air force has an increasingly large investment in so called ‘command and control’ computer systems. Such systems contain information about the status of our forces and are used in planning and executing military operations. For example, defence of the continental United States against air and missile attack is possible in part because of the use of such computer systems. And, of course, such systems support our forces in Vietnam.“The data in such systems is processed in response to questions and requests by commanders. Since the computer cannot ‘understand’ English, the commanders’ queries must be translated into a language that the computer can deal with; such languages resemble English very little, either in their form or in the ease with which they are learned and used. Command and control systems would be easier to use, and it would be easier to train people to use them, if this translation were not necessary. We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.”9
Followers of Chomsky were by then engaged in just such a project at the University of California, Los Angeles, prompting Colonel Gaines to comment: “Of course, studies like the UCLA study are but the first step toward achieving this goal. It does seem clear, however, that the successful operation of such systems will depend on insights gained from linguistic research ...”
The colonel went on to express the air force’s “satisfaction” with UCLA’s work.10
The language machine
On the eve of the computer age, Chomsky’s Syntactic structures excited and inspired a new generation of linguists because it chimed in with the spirit of the times. Younger scholars were becoming impatient with linguistics conceived as the accumulation of empirical facts about linguistic forms and traditions. Chomsky promised simplification by reducing language to a mechanical ‘device’ whose design could be precisely specified. Linguistics was no longer to be tarnished by association with ‘unscientific’ disciplines such as anthropology or sociology. Instead, it would be redefined as the study of a ‘natural object’ - the specialised module of the brain which (according to Chomsky) was responsible for linguistic computation. Excluding social factors and thereby transcending mere politics and ideology, the reconstructed discipline would at last qualify as a science akin to mathematics and physics.
In science, according to Chomsky, less is more. If a theory is sufficiently powerful and simple, it should radically reduce the amount of knowledge needed to understand the relevant facts. As he explains, “... the amount that you have to know in a field is not at all correlated with the success of the field. Maybe it’s even inversely related because the more success there is, in a sense, the less you have to know. You just have to understand; you have to understand more, but maybe know less.”11
Syntactic structures infuriated established linguists - and delighted as many iconoclasts - because its message was that much of the profession’s work had been a waste of time. Why laboriously list and classify anthropological observations on the world’s variegated languages if a simplifying short cut can be found? In an ice-cool, starkly logical argument that magisterially brushed aside most current linguistic theory, Syntactic structures evaluated some conceivable ways of constructing the ultimate ‘language machine’:
“Suppose we have a machine that can be in any one of a finite number of different internal states ... the machine begins in the initial state, runs through a sequence of states (producing a word with each transition), and ends in the final state. Then we call the sequence of words that has been produced a ‘sentence’. Each such machine thus defines a certain language: namely the set of sentences that can be produced in this way.”12
As his argument unfolds, Chomsky rules out his initial crude design for the envisaged machine - clearly, it would not work. By a process of elimination, he then progressively narrows the range of designs which - on purely theoretical grounds - ought to work. Thrillingly, Chomsky opens up the prospect of discovering in effect ‘the philosopher’s stone’: the design specifications of a ‘device’ capable of generating grammatical sentences (and only grammatical ones), not only in English, but in any language spoken (or capable of being spoken) on earth.
Syntactic structures itself, as it happened, proved unequal to the extraordinary task. Aware of this, Chomsky in his next book proposed a completely different design for his machine - variously known as the Aspects model or as the standard theory.13 Two mathematical linguists, Stanley Peters and Robert Ritchie, explored its implications - only to find that the class of grammars captured by the new model was so all-encompassing as to be vacuous. A device built in such a way, they found, would be quite extraordinarily stupid. In fact, it would be unable to distinguish between (a) any conceivable list of strings of symbols (say, all the decimal places of pi, divided into arbitrary sequences and enumerated by the value of the products of their digits) and (b) a list of actual strings used by humans for expressing themselves in, say, English. A “not too far-fetched analogy,” as one critic put it, “would be a biological theory which failed to characterise the difference between raccoons and light bulbs.”14
Chomsky proceeded as if none of this had any bearing on his work. In a pre-emptive strike, he declared that “the gravest defect of the theory of transformational grammar is its enormous latitude and descriptive power”. Constraints would have to be introduced, even if that meant complicating the originally simple and elegant design. “Notice that it is often a step forward,” Chomsky observed, “… when linguistic theory becomes more complex.”15 In place of standard theory - or ST, as it was known - Chomsky now offered the extended standard theory, or EST.
By the late 1970s, however, still further changes seemed required, leading to the ‘revised extended standard theory’, or REST. Realising that this was still unsatisfactory, in 1981 Chomsky published his Lectures on government and binding, which swept away much of the apparatus of earlier transformational theories in favour of a much more complex approach.16 In its ‘principles and parameters’ incarnation, the device might arguably have seemed quite encouraging to colonel Gaines:
“We can think of the initial state of the faculty of language as a fixed network connected to a switch box; the network is constituted of the principles of language, while the switches are the options to be determined by experience. When the switches are set one way, we have Swahili; when they are set another way, we have Japanese. Each possible human language is identified as a particular setting of the switches - a setting of parameters, in technical terminology. If the research programme succeeds, we should be able literally to deduce Swahili from one choice of settings, Japanese from another, and so on through the languages that humans can acquire.”17
Without abandoning this extraordinary dream, Chomsky has since jettisoned most of the specifics in favour of an even more radical version, known as the Minimalist Programme.18 This offers the prospect of building the device in a breathtakingly simple way. Don’t re-invent the laws of nature - just make them work for you! Imagine how a snowflake grows, or how a living cell divides.
As Chomsky explains, “So, is cell division some horrible mess? Or is it a process that follows very simple physical laws and requires no genetic instructions at all because it’s just how the physics works? Do things break up into spheres to satisfy least energy requirements? If that were true, it would be sort of perfect; it’s a complicated biological process that’s going the way it does because of fundamental physical laws. So, beautiful process.”19
Is the creativity of language a “beautiful process” in this sense? Is it “perfect” like a snowflake? Chomsky suspects that it might be. If he is right, then assembling the language machine might be easier than we thought. Just let nature do the work! For Chomsky, the natural principle behind language is “recursion” - the embedding of one output in another of the same type.20 Among English speakers the story of ‘The house that Jack built’ is often used to illustrate this principle. According to Chomsky, it is all you need. He admits that specific languages do seem to present additional complications. But anomalies should not distract us - any more than we should be led astray by accidental imperfections in a crystal. To grow a crystal, we do not have to anticipate random imperfections in advance.
This new, bare-bones approach strikes many of Chomsky’s colleagues as an astonishing - and arguably refreshing - rupture in his long and remarkable career. In fact, it calls into question “almost everything” Chomsky has previously claimed: “My own view is that almost everything is subject to question, especially if you look at it from a minimalist perspective ... So, if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said government is a unifying concept, X-bar theory is a unifying concept, the head parameter is an obvious parameter, ECP, etc, but now none of these looks obvious. X-bar theory, I think, is probably wrong, government maybe does not exist.”2(Let's question Chomsky and who he is- EW)
Even the concept of “deep structure” has now vanished altogether. To appreciate what this means, imagine Newton abandoning ‘gravity’ or Marx abandoning ‘class’. As Chomsky demolishes the fundamentals of his former paradigm, it is difficult to discern quite what remains. But then how precisely is the language device to be built? Is the underlying idea - the principle of recursion - enough in itself? The US military has long since abandoned all hope of a workable machine.
Linguistics as physics
To his academic colleagues in the humanities and social sciences, Chomsky’s programme has caused predictable astonishment, exasperation and even outrage. How could Chomsky imagine it possible - even in principle - to construct a ‘device’ enabling scientists to ‘deduce’ the languages currently or historically spoken across the world?
In replying to such critics, Chomsky accuses them of not understanding science. To do science, he explains, “you must abstract some object of study, you must eliminate those factors which are not pertinent ...”22 The linguist - according to Chomsky - cannot study humans articulating their thoughts under concrete social or historical conditions. Instead, you must replace reality with an abstract model. “Linguistic theory,” Chomsky declared in 1965, “is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.”23
In an implicit reference to the great Swiss theoretician, Ferdinand de Saussure, he invokes the authority of “the founders of modern general linguistics” in support of this position, adding that “no cogent reason for modifying it has been offered.”24
Chomsky’s decision, then, is to work with a deliberately simplified model. In applying this, he envisages children acquiring language not through successive stages, but in an instant. The evolutionary emergence of language is also conceptualised as an instantaneous event.25 Lexical concepts (the literal meanings of words) are for Chomsky not historically determined: they were genetically installed when our species evolved. But what about modern concepts such as, say, ‘carburettor’ or ‘bureaucrat’? Did our distant Stone Age ancestors already have such concepts in their heads? Chomsky thinks they must have done.
After defending this bizarre idea in a general way, he elaborates: “Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as ‘carburettor’ and ‘bureaucrat’, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it. The same is often true of technical terms of science and mathematics, and it surely appears to be the case for the terms of ordinary discourse. However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.”26
‘Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the concept of a bicycle - he just never had occasion to use them!” comments the philosopher, Dan Dennett, adding that he and his colleagues find it hard not to burst out laughing at this point.27 Chomsky is here defending a strong form of the so-called ‘modular mind’ hypothesis, initially inspired by his own theory of an innate ‘language device’. Humans, according to this view, speak not for social reasons, but in expressing their individual genetic nature, speech being the autonomous output of a specialised computational mechanism - the ‘language organ’ - genetically ‘installed’ (Chomsky’s term) in the brain of every child on earth.
In his capacity as a natural scientist, Chomsky sees people as “natural objects”, their language a “part of nature”, while linguistics as a discipline “falls naturally within human biology”.28 However, this is not biology as normally understood. Discussing how language may have evolved, Chomsky suggests: “The answers may well lie not so much in the theory of natural selection as in molecular biology, in the study of what kinds of physical systems can develop under the conditions of life on earth ...”29
The apparently complicated features of grammar may be “simply emergent physical properties of a brain that reaches a certain level of complexity under the specific conditions of human evolution”.30 In an echo of the Manhattan project, Chomsky offers is own version of what might be termed the cognitive meltdown theory: “We know very little about what happens when 1010 neurons are crammed into something the size of a basketball, with further conditions imposed by the specific manner in which this system developed over time. It would be a serious error to suppose that all properties, or the interesting properties of the structures that evolved, can be ‘explained’ by natural selection.”31
But Chomsky has proposed a variety of scenarios. He appears equally happy with the speculation that “... a mutation took place in the genetic instructions for the brain, which was then reorganised in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry to install a faculty of language”.32 As if willing to try anything, he has recently suggested that language’s recursive structure may have emerged as a spandrel - an accidental by-product - of unspecified other developments connected with, say, navigation or mind-reading.33
For Chomsky, linguistics can aspire to the precision of physics because language itself is a “natural object”. As such, it approximates to a “perfect system”. Biologists, according to Chomsky, do not expect perfection, which is a distinctive hallmark of physics. He explains: “In the study of the inorganic world, for mysterious reasons, it has been a valuable heuristic to assume that things are very elegant and beautiful.”34 If it is to succeed in connecting sounds with meanings, language must solve a number of technical problems. In an apparent nod toward creationism or ‘intelligent design’, Chomsky continues:
“If a divine architect were faced with the problem of designing something to satisfy these conditions, would actual human language be one of the candidates, or close to it? Recent work suggests that language is surprisingly ‘perfect’ in this sense ... Insofar as that is true, language seems unlike other objects of the biological world, which are typically a rather messy solution to some class of problems, given the physical constraints and the materials that history and accident have made available.”35
Language, according to Chomsky, cannot just have evolved. It lacks the untidiness we would expect of an accumulation of accidents made good by evolutionary ‘tinkering’. Characterised by beauty bordering on perfection, it cannot have arisen in the normal Darwinian way.
Who benefits?
It is perhaps easy to understand why computer engineers might find it useful to treat language as a mechanical ‘device’. If, say, the aim were to construct an electronic command-and-control system for military use, then traditional linguistics would clearly be inadequate. The requirement would be for a version of language stripped free of meanings in any human or cultural sense - stripped of metaphor, poetry, humour, politics or anything else not accessible to a machine.
But military figures such as colonel Gaines were not the only people who in the 1960s hoped to benefit from the new approach. What of Chomsky’s other institutional sources of support? And what about his own fiercely anti-militarist politics? How did an anti-capitalist revolution connect with the ‘revolution’ Chomsky was inaugurating within linguistics? Indeed, can the two sides of Chomsky’s output be reconciled at all? Was the young anarchist tailoring his theories to meet the requirements of his military sponsors - forcing us, perhaps, to question the sincerity of his anarcho-syndicalist commitments? Or did he believe he was taking the money - refusing to let this influence his scientific results - in order to secure the best possible position from which to promote the anarchist cause?
(If you've been interested up to this point, well, you've got to read the entire paper- EW)
http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/pub_knight_on_chomsky.pdf
(Okay I couldn't resist adding this on on October 6, 2007, jumping ahead to where Knight solves the Chomsky enigma)-
1.11 Chomsky in political perspective
Let us retrace our steps. Consider Chomsky the young anarchist, faced with the problem of breaking into academia. Given his outspoken views, how was he to overcome the many obstacles that would naturally be placed in his way?
It would appear that Chomsky found a way of turning his apparent political handicap into an advantage. Financially and institutionally, the requirement – he knew – was for an agenda the precise reverse of anarchosyndicalism. The 1950s represented the dawn of the new computer age. Key intellectual and technical developments were being funded by the American military. These and other corporate forces required a new version of cognitive and linguistic science, having little in common with what they saw as Marxist-inspired versions of sociology or anthropology. What was needed was a psychology and a linguistics completely stripped of social content or political awareness – a version of these disciplines rigorously re-engineered and fine-tuned to serve the computer age in the name of ‘cognitive revolution’. But how could the left’s ‘natural’ ascendancy in these disciplines be overturned? Corporate America needed someone of intellectual integrity and – preferably – of unimpeachable political integrity to act as its standard-bearer in organizing the necessary coup. Ideally, this person should not only be ‘left-wing’ in an ordinary, run-of-the-mill sense. The perfect candidate would be sufficiently left-wing to outflank everyone else in the race. Chomsky in 1957 was the right person arriving in the right position at exactly the right time.
In the event, Chomsky forged an anti-behaviourist coalition linking much of the academic left with those corporate forces – including the military – who were underwriting the development of the nascent computer industry. It was an unholy alliance, and as such was destined to fall apart once the behaviourist enemy had been overthrown. Jerome Bruner (1990: 2-3) recalls:
‘Now let me tell you first what I and my friends thought the revolution was about back there in the late 1950s. It was, we thought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept in psychology — not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behaviour, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning. ....we were not out to “reform” behaviourism, but to replace it’.
‘The cognitive revolution as originally conceived’, Bruner (1990: 3) continues, ‘virtually required that psychology join forces with anthropology and linguistics, philosophy and history, even with the discipline of law’.
Once behaviourism had been toppled, however, Chomsky clarified that this was not his vision at all. As Bruner (1990: 40) explains:
‘Very early on.....emphasis began shifting from ‘meaning’ to ‘information’, from the construction of meaning to the processing of information. These are profoundly different matters. The key factor in the shift was the introduction of computation as the ruling metaphor and of computability as a necessary criterion of a good theoretical model’.
Information, as Bruner(1990: 4) points out, is a term designed to be indifferent with respect to meaning. In computational terms, information comprises an already precoded message in the system. Meaning is preassigned to messages. It is not an outcome of computation nor is it relevant to computation save in the arbitrary sense of assignment:
‘According to classic information theory, a message is informative if it reduces alternative choices. This implies a code of established possible choices. The categories of possibility and the instances they comprise are processed according to the “syntax” of the system, its possible moves. Insofar as information in this dispensation can deal with meaning it is in the dictionary sense only: accessing stored lexical information according to a coded address.’
In integrating his new version of linguistics with computer science, Chomsky dispensed with concepts such as ‘intention’, ‘context’ and ‘meaning’ in favour of an insistent and relentless focus on ‘syntax’. It was Alan Turing’s great discovery that machines can be designed to evaluate any inference that is ‘formally valid’ – that is, valid by virtue of the internal syntax of the pre-installed code. No machine can genuinely talk, because speaking entails understanding what other speakers may have in mind as they draw on their memories and experiences of themselves and others on the biological, social, cultural, religious and other levels inhabited by human minds. Machines are and always will be hopeless at passing themselves off as humans. But, as Fodor (2000: 13) points out,
‘you can build them so that they are quite good at detecting and responding to syntactic properties and relations. That, in turn, is because the syntax of a sentence reduces to the identity and arrangement of its elementary parts, and, at least in the artificial languages that machines compute in, these elementary parts and arrangements can be exhaustively itemized, and the machine specifically designed to detect them’.
Such a system, however, cannot cope with vagueness, with polysemy or with metaphoric or connotative connections – in other words, with the stuff of human language. Consequently, Chomsky and his followers simply stopped talking of meaning – replacing the idea with “computability” instead. Linguists now spoke not of intention, belief or agency but of mechanical ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ – notions not too different, as Bruner (1990: 7) points out, from the ‘stimuli’ and ‘responses’ of the behaviourists who were supposed to have been overthrown.
Writing of Chomsky’s overall scientific contribution, Geoffrey Leech (1983: 3) comments:
‘It has the advantage of maintaining the integrity of linguistics, as within a walled city, away from the contaminating influences of use and context. But many have grave doubts about the narrowness of this paradigm’s definition of language, and about the high degree of abstraction and idealization of data which it requires’.
Child-language specialist Elizabeth Bates (1984) complains of the ‘scorched earth’ policy deployed by Chomsky and his allies to keep the opposition at bay.
While the overthrow of behavourism was widely celebrated, the ‘revolution’ intended by Chomsky’s corporate sponsors had nothing to do with the establishment of a science of human meaning. As these forces championed Chomsky in steering the ‘cognitive revolution’ along channels narrowly defined by their specific commercial and political goals, the intellectuals who had supported generativism ‘from the left’ felt betrayed. Had they been able to unite, they might have comprised a formidable intellectual and political force. In the event, however, Chomsky’s politics served him and his sponsors well. Left-wing resistance to Chomsky’s science was always tempered by respect for his moral and political integrity. How do you attack an ‘enemy’ who is on your own side? The ambivalence ended up simply paralysing the opposition, whose splits and disagreements left Chomsky with a free hand — which he used quite mercilessly. It is fair to say that most of those linguists and other creative thinkers whose contributions were excluded by Chomsky had political sympathies not vastly different from his own. Together, they could have mounted an impressive intellectual defence of the unity and autonomy of science. In the event, it was Chomsky’s defection that sealed their fate. Alienated from the academic mainstream, this talented individual was in effect selected by corporate America to do an extraordinary double-act, playing the role of chief enforcer for the new corporate science at home – while using this very status to gain a hearing as the most eloquent academic critic of U.S. policies elsewhere across the globe.
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Notes
1. RA Harris The linguistics wars New York 1993.
2. H Maclay, ‘Linguistics: overview’, in D Steinberg and L Jakobovits (eds) Semantics Cambridge 1971, p163.
3. N Chomsky Class warfare (interviews with David Barsamian), London 1996, p102.
4. Op cit p98.
5. N Chomsky Syntactic structures The Hague 1957, p1.
6. N Chomsky Aspects of the theory of syntax Cambridge, Mass 1965, piv.
7. Interview in J Peck (ed) The Chomsky reader London 1988, pp15-16.
8. See FJ Newmeyer The politics of linguistics Chicago 1986, p84.
9. Ibid pp85-86. This source of funding was initially very helpful to Chomsky, but dried up completely in the late 1960s. Had the military been expecting from Chomsky a real ‘command and control’ machine, they would have been disappointed - he could not deliver anything workable and anyway was not interested. What corporate America got from Chomsky were long-term institutional gains in terms of how science was defined, not devices which could be manufactured or patented.
10. Ibid.
11. Interview in J Peck (ed) The Chomsky reader London 1988, p17.
12. N Chomsky Syntactic structures The Hague 1957, p18.
13. N Chomsky Aspects of the theory of syntax Cambridge, Mass 1965.
14. E Bach, ‘Explanatory inadequacy’, in D Cohen (ed) Explaining linguistic phenomena New York 1974, p158. See also S Peters and R Ritchie, ‘On restricting the base component of transformational grammar Information and Control 18: 493-501, 1971; S Peters and R Ritchie, ‘On the generative power of transformational grammars’ Information Sciences 6: 49-83, 1973; S Peters and R Ritchie, ‘Non-filtering and local-filtering transformational grammars’, in J Hintikka et al (eds) Approaches to natural language Dordrecht 1973, pp180-94.
15. N Chomsky Studies on semantics in generative grammar The Hague 1972, pp125-26. Since Chomsky denies the relevance of Peters-Ritchie, it is worth quoting Frederick Newmeyer, then a strong supporter of Chomsky: “The Peters-Ritchie findings,” he writes, “served as silent witness to almost all of the significant work in syntax in the 1970s. There was hardly a paper written that did not appeal to the increased restrictiveness of the theory that followed as a consequence of the adoption of the [Peters-Ritchie] proposals ... Constraint after constraint was put forward to limit the power of the grammar” (FJ Newmeyer Linguistic theory in America New York 1980, p176). For discussion, see RA Harris The linguistics wars New York 1993, p293n.
16. N Chomsky Lectures on government and binding Dordrecht 1981.
17. N Chomsky New horizons in the study of language and mind Cambridge 2000, p8.
18. Outlined in N Chomsky The minimalist programme Cambridge, Mass 1995.
19. N Chomsky On nature and language Cambridge 2002, p103.
20. MD Hauser, N Chomsky and W Tecumseh Fitch, ‘The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?’ Science 298, 1569-1579, 2002.
21. N Chomsky On nature and language Cambridge 2002, p151.
22. N Chomsky Language and responsibility (interviews with Mitsou Ronat), New York 1979, p57.
23. N Chomsky Aspects of the theory of syntax Cambridge, Mass 1965, pp3-4.
24. Ibid.
25. N Chomsky On nature and language Cambridge 2002, p148.
26. N Chomsky New horizons in the study of language and mind Cambridge 2000, pp64-66.
27. D Dennett Consciousness explained London 1991, pp192-93n.
28. N Chomsky Reflections of language London 1976, pp186, 123.
29. N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge Cambridge, Mass 1988, p167.
30. N Chomsky, ‘Linguistics and cognitive science: problems and mysteries’, in A Kasher (ed) The Chomskyan turn: generative linguistics, philosophy, mathematics and psychology Oxford 1991, p50.
31. N Chomsky Reflections on language London 1976, p59.
32. N Chomsky ‘Language and mind: current thoughts on ancient problems’ Pesquisa Linguistica 3, 4, 1998, p17.
33. MD Hauser, N Chomsky and W Tecumseh Fitch, ‘The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298, 1569-1579, 2002.
34. N Chomsky New horizons in the study of language and mind Cambridge 2000, pp106-33.
35. N Chomsky Powers and prospects: reflections on human nature and the social order London 1996, p30.
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Monday, October 01, 2007
Chomsky on crack?
I speak kindly of Eva Golinger's new blog "Postcards from the Revolution" and will continue to do so even though she is clearly a devout fan of professor Noam Chomsky (to me he is a left gatekeeper and an apologist for the very real and powerful Jewish sector of the US ruling class, but I'm not going to go much into that on this post). She has a lengthy interview with the old boy in which he reveals that a revolution is bubbling just beneath the surface in the United States of America.
There is a bookfair going on in Venezuela now with the theme of "United States: Is a Revolution Possible?"
From Eva's blog-
EVA: On that note, the theme of the Book Fair in Venezuela this year is "United States: Is a Revolution Possible?" Is it?
CHOMSKY: I think it's just below the surface.
Mmmmm well, if I were planning policy in Venezuela I would not count on this prognosis. Is a revolution possible in the US? - yeah, well, maybe eventually. Is it "just below the surface?" - Well, depends on what you call "surface" but here is a tip for whoever wants it. - This time next year the United States will not be in a revolutionary state. (In my opinoin thanks in a small measure to professor Chomsky).
Chavez puts on the brakes, or says he will.
As my regular readers know I'm married to a Venezuelan woman. Also that I am home now because I got hit by a car and am convalescing.
So I was dozing and my wife was watching Globovision on cable TV here in New York. They have a program called Alo Ciudadano (Hello Citizen) that is a take off on the weekly television program/seminar/national town hall meeting chaired by Venezuela's elected and much loved President, Hugo Chavez. Alo Ciudadano features short samples of the President's presentation (that can run to eight hours and is broadcast by law on all Venezuelan TV stations) and then they go about trying to tear him up ( Globovision is, just like almost all the privately owned and predominant media in Venezuela, hostile to Presdient Chavez and in fact acted in concert with the coup of 2001 and the economic sabotage of 2002 - failed efforts of pro US "democrats" to ovcerthrow the elected president of Venezuela). Yes, they still function even after that!
I think President Chavez sometimes says things that either just don't get followed through by his entourage or the middle bureacracy, or he changes his mind. What comes to mind is one prgram around a year ago in which he said that he was going to increase the incredibly low cost of gasoline (around two cents a gallon) while cushioning the impact of this increase on the poor Venezuelans who almost unanimously adore him. Well, the increase never happened and I never heard any follow up statement as to why it never happened. So, sometimes the president makes public plans that do not come to fruition.
Today he made an announcement that so excited my wife she woke me up to tell me about it - that CADIVI (the agency that controls legal access to dollars in Venezuela and offers them at a rate around half of the street illegal market cost) would now no longer be authorizing dollars to buy whiskey or Hummers. Now Venezuela is a major major importer of whiskey and the president said that this is an embarassment and incongruent with a revolution. He also might have read this item that appeared in an English language pro Chavez website called Venezuela Headlines-
Venezuela poised for invasion from the United States as Hummer go on sale!
Seems Venezuela is poised to be the number two nation for Hummer sales or was until today's Alo Presidente television program.
I hope this plan goes through and that no one puts the kibosh on it. Let there be no more hunger in revolutionary Venezuela, then let the haves buy their Hummers and expensive foreign booze.
So I was dozing and my wife was watching Globovision on cable TV here in New York. They have a program called Alo Ciudadano (Hello Citizen) that is a take off on the weekly television program/seminar/national town hall meeting chaired by Venezuela's elected and much loved President, Hugo Chavez. Alo Ciudadano features short samples of the President's presentation (that can run to eight hours and is broadcast by law on all Venezuelan TV stations) and then they go about trying to tear him up ( Globovision is, just like almost all the privately owned and predominant media in Venezuela, hostile to Presdient Chavez and in fact acted in concert with the coup of 2001 and the economic sabotage of 2002 - failed efforts of pro US "democrats" to ovcerthrow the elected president of Venezuela). Yes, they still function even after that!
I think President Chavez sometimes says things that either just don't get followed through by his entourage or the middle bureacracy, or he changes his mind. What comes to mind is one prgram around a year ago in which he said that he was going to increase the incredibly low cost of gasoline (around two cents a gallon) while cushioning the impact of this increase on the poor Venezuelans who almost unanimously adore him. Well, the increase never happened and I never heard any follow up statement as to why it never happened. So, sometimes the president makes public plans that do not come to fruition.
Today he made an announcement that so excited my wife she woke me up to tell me about it - that CADIVI (the agency that controls legal access to dollars in Venezuela and offers them at a rate around half of the street illegal market cost) would now no longer be authorizing dollars to buy whiskey or Hummers. Now Venezuela is a major major importer of whiskey and the president said that this is an embarassment and incongruent with a revolution. He also might have read this item that appeared in an English language pro Chavez website called Venezuela Headlines-
Venezuela poised for invasion from the United States as Hummer go on sale!
Seems Venezuela is poised to be the number two nation for Hummer sales or was until today's Alo Presidente television program.
I hope this plan goes through and that no one puts the kibosh on it. Let there be no more hunger in revolutionary Venezuela, then let the haves buy their Hummers and expensive foreign booze.
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