Noam Chomsky, "Foundations of World Order: the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” - MIT Technology and Culture Forum

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JANE GOULD: You patient souls who've been here for a long time holding your seats, welcome. I'm Jane Gould, the coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum.

And I'd like to welcome you to tonight's program, "Noam Chomsky on the Foundations of World Order-- 50 Years of the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

Before we turn to tonight's program, I call your attention to the Technology and Culture Forum's next program, "Reinventing Universities for the 21st Century." There is a sign with all the information above my head. And do come. Wednesday, March 3, at 5:30 PM in 6120.

The Technology and Culture Forum will be hosting four more programs this spring. If you'd like to be on our mailing list, you can either sign on one of the sheets of paper on the table in the hall as you leave, or go to our website and just put yourself onto the list.

Now to tonight's program. We're all here because we want to hear Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is honored by MIT as an institute professor. His doctoral thesis on transformational analysis began his radical transformation of the field of linguistics.

Honorary degrees, learned in professional societies, significant awards-- his list is luminous. Few have escaped his notice.

And yet, as a public intellectual, Professor Chomsky has always taken seriously his responsibility to stimulate and lead public debate. In addition to speaking and writing on linguistics and philosophy, he's taken on intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs, US foreign policy, to name a few of his key topics.

Late this last year, I received an email encouraging me to participate in a 70th birthday card for Noam Chomsky. Online, global-- hundreds, thousands-- the list went on, and people couldn't resist saying how they'd been challenged and inspired by Chomsky.

Tonight, he's here to look at the last 50 years, what we created, what we have, and where we are to go. Noam Chomsky.

[APPLAUSE]

NOAM CHOMSKY: I just realized while listening to Jane announce the title that it's also just about 50 years since I walked into this building for the first time. But I won't talk about that.

We've just passed the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was a few weeks ago. The Human Rights Regime, which was encoded in that declaration, is one of the pillars of the system of world order that was constructed on the wreckage of World War II.

There were two other major foundation stones. One was the International Political Order, which is articulated in the United Nations Charter. And the third is the International Economic System, sometimes called the Bretton Woods System, designed primarily by the United States and Britain right at the end of the war.

These three systems were closely integrated, conceptually and in fact. The thinking behind them illustrates that, as does their interactions over the years.

And to a degree, that's quite unusual in world affairs. The three foundations reflected public attitudes and concerns over quite a wide range.

For that very reason, the principles that were articulated and, to some extent, instituted-- those principles were quite distasteful to elite elements, namely those who were actually in a position to construct and shape and guide the actual world order. And they very quickly took steps to dismantle, or at least attenuate, the lofty principles.

The conflicts over these matters constitute a large part of modern history-- post Cold War history. That's not the usual framework of analysis for discussing it. But in my opinion, it ought to be.

Well, large issues. There's a lot in print. There's many treatises yet to be written even to be researched. I don't think the topics have been addressed with anything like enough seriousness.

But I'll try to give some indication of why I think that's an appropriate and instructive way to view the contemporary world system. It's our origins at the time of the Second World War. And maybe it's likely future.

So the main question that I want to get to is, what has been the fate of the three basic and integrated pillars of world order that were established half a century ago? And specifically, what has been the role of the United States, which has been the primary actor on the world scene throughout-- remains so-- and the one that's most important for us, for obvious reasons, independently of the significance and scale of its contributions, which are usually quite great for equally obvious reasons.

Well, that's the main question that I want to get to. But I'd like to approach it by a detour just to make life more complicated. And the detour has two tracks that I'd like to explore a little bit, and then, from them, get back to the questions.

The first track is simply to remind everyone of what you already know. We have to bear in mind that the questions are not abstract and they're not about some distant planet. So it's not like an academic topic for an academic seminar. We're dealing with questions of life and death, of suffering and pain and despair. The voices that are heard-- not that one.

[LAUGHTER]

The voices that are heard [LAUGHS] are those of the rich and the powerful, naturally. There are also those who have sought to be a voice for the voiceless.

Their fate hasn't been too happy. Some were simply assassinated by our hands, or those working for us-- a chapter of modern history the one doesn't read about too much. In fact, they were assassinated. And there's quite a number of them, doubly in that they were first killed and then silenced.

So you can do a check and see how many of your friends can tell you the names of Eastern European dissidents and murdered. There are murdered counterparts in Central America. And how many books you've read by one and by the other and so on. It's an instructive lesson.

But the voices that we hear, the ones that remain, are typically the powerful. And that's important because that's not the only voice. That's the voice of a small minority here and a tiny minority worldwide.

Well, let me illustrate from right now. There are major stories in the press these last few days on the G7 meetings-- the meetings of the seven richest industrial countries-- and on the interchanges between their leaders. So for example, president Chirac's, of France, his interchanges with Robert Rubin, who I guess might be called co-president of the United States.

[SOFT LAUGHTER]

We have to give Alan Greenspan at least half the presidency.

[LAUGHTER]

So that's been all over the front pages. And those discussions are interesting and tell you a lot if you look at them closely-- even not so closely. The outcome of these discussions-- G7 and the other interchanges-- reveal the power of the United States in a rather dramatic form, and also its extreme isolation, even among the richest countries.

And if you look a little more closely, and you'll learn a lot about the true nature of the actually functioning international economic system, of the difference between the doctrines that apply to the rich and the powerful by their insistence, and the opposite doctrines, which are imposed on everyone else.

That comes out with great starkness in the articles discussing these issues. I'll come back to that in connection with the third pillar of world order, the International Economic System.

Well, there are no stories-- and I mean none-- on the G15 meetings, which have taken place at same time in Jamaica in the last couple of weeks. In the national press, it's literally zero. I rely on a database search done by a friend who has access to that monster.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have no word on them. There is no shortage of information. The Associated Press had stories, except they weren't run. And the BBC World Services had extensive coverage.

And if you look around the peripheral press, particularly in Florida, there was coverage-- Florida, I presume, because of the Latin American connection. But the national press blanked it out.

Now, these aren't minor countries. These are major. These are not what are dismissed as "basket cases" like sub-Saharan Africa. This is Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, India, Indonesia, and Nigeria-- quite substantial countries in which people expect to make a lot of money if they can. 17 of them, even though it's called G15-- a good part of the world.

And they do have something to say, believe it or not. And you can even read it. For example, you read it on the front page if you happen to subscribe to the leading journal in Egypt.

[LAUGHTER]

--The Al-Ahram, which has an English edition so you can read it in English. What they say at the G15 meeting is that the United States and Britain-- this is mostly quotes-- are unwilling to enter into a dialogue with the South.

"The South" is what is euphemistically called the developing world. Which direction they're developing, you can argue about.

The US and Britain are unwilling to enter into a dialogue with the South, which is always forced to make concessions in the World Trade Organization to the benefit of the rich. The true story of globalization, they continue, is that the North-- that's G7-- has to make maximum benefits, and the South is only entitled to a limited margin of development. And if this margin is crossed, the Western speculators are there to take you down as quickly as they can.

That's not false. But it's a considerable understatement than the writers surely know it. US power and violence has also been there to take you down as quickly as it can if countries tried to pursue the path of dependent development, what's called in US planning circles "radical nationalism" or "economic nationalism" or sometimes even "excessive development."

That's not to be permitted in the current period of globalization, for reasons I'll get back to. You don't have to send the Marines that often. The speculators can do the job.

The G15 meeting goes on to issue a plea to Western investors. It says, we don't want to stifle you, but we want to know who you are. And we want you to come and go in an orderly fashion.

That's precisely what the North will not accept. The demand that not be accepted is a core part of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which has been deflected thanks to activist pressure, which succeeded in escaping media controls, but deflected-- not stopped-- coming back in other ways. And the point is to prevent the G15 plea from being realized.

This, then, is accompanied by grim accounts of the effects of the specific form of globalization that's been instituted in the past 25 years. It has two major aspects that are relevant here. One is that it's been an economic failure, from the point of view of statistics at least-- not from the point of view of rich people.

So economic growth has slowed over most of the world. And as a fraction of gross domestic product, as a fraction of economic product, the proportion that goes to working people has declined. So working people are getting a declining part of a slowing economy. That's essentially the story.

The long-term tendency of this is a form of globalization. It's kind of a globalization of the structural model of the third world. And that's a very clear structural model. You find it just about anywhere, which is a relic of European-- and I include here, US-- imperialism.

So you find societies with a very small sector of extremely, extremely wealthy people, usually linked to the foreign masters, and a large number of people who are somewhere between survival and suffering, and a category of superfluous people.

In our dependencies, they're often called the "disposable people," as in Colombia, where you dispose of them-- send out the death squads or the paramilitaries. We're a more civilized society. We throw them in jail instead on various fraudulent crime words.

But that model is spreading. It takes a different form in a rich country, like the United States, than a poor country like, say, Haiti. But the structure is quite similar.

And the United States and Britain, it's pretty, very explicit. And the rest, in the other rich countries, it's partially true.

And it's devastatingly true in most of the world, including now Eastern Europe, now that the end of the Cold War has led to it's more or less predictable outcome. And the countries of Eastern Europe are returning to what they were before that attempt at independent nationalism.

So the ones that were deep, third-world poverty like Russia are returning to that status. The ones that were part of the West, like the Czech Republic, are returning to that status, about as one should have expected. In my opinion, that's pretty much what the Cold War was about.

But so that model is a familiar one. And it's now being kind of globalized. That's the globalization process. Well, that's the G15 view of it. You get a much more pained and anguished view when you get to the poorer countries. Those are the richer countries outside the really rich world. Well, so they are silenced.

I'll take a second example. A year ago, the World Trade Organization celebrated the 50th anniversary of the global trading system. It was originally GATT, now the World Trade Organization.

And that one got plenty of media coverage. There was lots of coverage of the inspired rhetoric by Bill Clinton and world leaders, talked about the marvels that had been achieved through global trade and so on.

There was also a spokesperson for the United Nations there. It was the Secretary General of UNCTAD, the UN Conference on Trade and Development-- the main United Nations economic research and analysis organization, which is, according to its charter, committed to an international trading system that promotes economic and social development.

And he gave a talk too, representing the rest of the world, the United Nations, as an economist. And he closed his speech by saying, "No one should be fooled by the festive atmosphere of these celebrations. Outside there is anguish and fear, insecurity about jobs, and a life of quiet desperation."

Well, there was ample media coverage, as I said. But it much preferred-- in fact, kept to-- the festive atmosphere within. Although, again, you can read this if you happen to subscribe to a very good Third World journal that's published in Penang, Malaysia. There's a name for that. It's called free press, I think.

[LAUGHTER]

The Secretary General of UNCTAD presented the same message-- the same message, pretty much-- at the recent G15 meeting a couple days ago. He predicted a bleak future for the vast majority of the people of the South, although a small sector is and will continue to be quite wealthy.

Well, the story that he describes is also similar here, including the part about insecurity. And that's not exactly a secret.

So Alan Greenspan, when he was testifying before the Congress Senate Banking Committee, taking pride in the fairy tale economy, as it's known, over which he presided, attributed it in large measure to what he called greater worker insecurity, meaning workers are just intimidated. And they're frightened they're not going to have a job tomorrow. And they're afraid ask for a raise or for benefits and so on.

And that contributes substantially to what's called the health of the economy. It's a concept that's uncorrelated with the health of the people in the economy, but it's a concept. It's good. It keeps inflation down, keeps profits up-- all sorts of good things.

And it's real. If you look at polls taken, say, by Business Week, you find that like around 90% of working people are insecure about their job-- some very insecure. About 70% are afraid that if they tried to get involved in union organizing, they'll be fired.

The reasons for this intimidation are several, some of them pretty straightforward. Some of it is just straight corporate crime, which is very easy when it's backed by a criminal state.

The Reagan administration made it clear and open to the business world that it was simply not going to enforce the laws. As a result, the firing of union organizers went way up-- approximately tripled.

And other measures could be used to ensure that workers would stay intimidated. That continues under the Clinton administration.

Another measure of intimidation is what are mislabeled "free trade agreements." They're not about free trade. And they're surely not agreements-- at least, if the population matters.

The fact that they're called "agreements" is interesting, because it's recognized that, at least in any country that's democratic enough to take polls like Canada and the United States, that the population is against them. But they're agreements, nevertheless, which tells you something about the conception of democracy.

If they were about free trade, say, cutting back tariffs, NAFTA could have taken 2 pages. It's 2,200 pages because it's not about free trade.

But what are called "free trade agreements" have the property that they are a way of threatening workers. So there are even some studies on it, one by a very good labor historian at Cornell, Kate Bronfenbrenner, showing that in about half of organizing efforts since NAFTA, there's been an effort to disrupt by threat of transfer.

And it's not an unreal threat. Where organizing has nevertheless succeeded, the number of transfers has tripled. And if you look where it's tripled, it's in the mobile industries, like not construction, but manufacturing.

So it's a real threat, and it helps intimidate people. And it contributes to the health of the economy. And of course, in a poorer country, it's a much greater threat.

So that's part of the fairy tale economy, which is, indeed, a fairy tale economy for some people, including people in the sector that most of us come from-- me, in particular. For that sector of the population, it's a fairy tale.

When you look at the reports of the fairy tale economy, you find two things mentioned-- return on capital and the stock market. And for those who have stock, say the rapid asset inflation of the past years has made them very rich.

What it means for the economy is debated. But it certainly made them very rich. So it's a fairy tale for the 1% of the economy who own about half the stock-- similar figures for other assets.

And for the 10% who own most of the rest, about 85% of the benefits have gone to about 10% of the population. If you go to the next 10%, the second decile, they've actually lost net worth during the Clinton recovery. You go down further, it looks uglier over the past years.

In fact, this recovery is unusual and, I think, unprecedented. First of all, it's quite slow, even by the standards of the postwar period, certainly-- not very different from the sluggish recoveries of the '70s and '80s-- much below the earlier ones. But it's also unusual in that most of the population has been left out.

Just now, after the peak of the business cycle, it was 1989-- so it's almost 10 years-- just now, the median is getting back to where it was in 1989. There's never been such a slow recovery for the majority-- it's probably 70%, 80% of the population. Never been anything like that before.

Wages-- or, about real wages-- are about 15% below what they were in 1973. In fact, they're back at the level of around 1964 or so. Depends a little how you measure.

Incomes, to the extent that they stay up, are staying up because people are just working a lot more. So the typical American family is putting in about 15 weeks a year more of work than it did 20 years ago to try to keep it at a stagnating or a declining level.

If you're interested in data about this, the best general database about this kind of stuff-- also written quite clearly-- comes out every two years. It's called The State of Working America. The Economic Policy Institute just came out with their 1998, '99 edition just a couple of weeks ago, which can fill you in on details up to the current evidence.

Well, let me put off for a moment how this return relates to the fate of the three pillars. But the point that I'm trying to stress is that all of this stuff has to do with real human beings and their fate. It's not a pleasant story.

And when we bring in the fate of future generations who don't have a vote, as it's called in the market, in the very restricted market systems that exist-- if we bring them in, then the story is even uglier.

Well, that's the first detour. The second one-- and I will get back to the topic-- has to do with the norms and the conventions for discussing all of this, for discussing world order. And there are some norms and conventions. And if you depart from them, you're kind of not part of the discussion.

The norms and the conventions are that the goals, the intentions, the purposes, as they're sometimes called, of the United States and its leaders are high-minded, sincere, or benign-- other good things. And that, crucially, is true independently a fact. And it is understood to be true independently of fact.

So for example, the very same books and scholarly articles and so on that pronounce that as a truth often also are dedicated to showing that it's refuted by the facts. And that's called an irony or a departure of some exogenous factor or something or other. That's pretty standard.

So indeed, the thesis is refuted overwhelmingly by the internal documentary record-- the doc record of planning-- and even more dramatically by the historical record of practice.

But it doesn't matter. The principle remains true. And it provides the framework of discussion. And one part of a good education is to understand that-- to get that internalized enough so you can then take part in the debate, which proceeds in this fashion.

It's reminiscent of medieval and early modern theological dogma. And interestingly, it's sometimes even presented in those terms, especially in what's called realist international theory.

However, although the comparison comes to mind, I think it's unfair. It's kind of an insult to me to medieval theology.

[LAUGHTER]

I mean that quite seriously. And I'll explain why if you're interested. But let me put it aside. Anyway, it has something of the flavor of a theological principle.

Notice that these principles don't apply to anyone else. So for example, nobody pays any attention to the high-minded rhetoric of Stalin's constitution or the exalted rhetoric that accompanies what those who carry it out call humanitarian interventions, of which the most obvious case is in this century, I suppose-- at least if you judge by the rhetoric-- are Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and North China, and Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The rhetoric was very impressive and full of humanitarian ideals and noble purposes and so on. And like most propaganda, it wasn't totally false. Like you'll find fragments of truth in it.

So for example, Hitler was invited in by the president of Slovakia. And the Japanese actually had one of the leading Chinese nationalists as a puppet and so on.

But we don't pay any attention to that stuff. We don't regard that as evidence of benign intentions in those and other cases. The principles hold only at home, not anywhere else. And here they hold, irrespective of the facts, and often in the very same documents, say, scholarly articles, which present the facts to refute them.

That's kind of misleading to give examples because that would understate the uniformity and the extremism. And it would be misleading, quote, "the press." So I won't because that's too easy.

Let me just give one example which happens to be the last one that I looked at last night in a current Journal of International Affairs. And it's kind of an interesting case and a very good scholar. Highly critical of US government policies, which makes it more interesting-- this article, too.

It's worth examining, not only because it illustrates the conventions, but because of what we discover when we look a little more closely-- not only about contemporary history but also about ourselves-- what we do, how we deal with it.

The record is particularly instructive in this case, because the Cold War is almost totally irrelevant. This goes back a long way and never has been any Cold War relevant. And it's been recognized.

The institutions of power and decision making remain unchanged. From that we conclude, if we were rational, that it's likely to be a pretty good predictor of where things are going to go, at least if we allow them to go that way.

The article is by a well-known Middle East scholar. He's also a leading policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and elsewhere. He's been highly critical of US policy toward the Middle East, which is his specialty. The article is, too.

And he gives a recommendation, which in fact is highlighted by the journal. So it's like the most important part of the recommendation. It says, "The United States should more energetically promote central US foreign policy themes, especially freedom, democracy, and human rights."

Notice these are central US foreign policy themes. No argument or evidence is presented to establish that fact because none is needed. That is a theological dogma. It's like "God is great" or something.

[LAUGHTER]

You don't have to present evidence for that. It's just a truth.

Then the article proceeds, after having established the truth. And it goes on-- and this is quite typical-- to describe how the United States has consistently acted contrary to its central foreign policy themes in the Middle East.

The author then goes on to say, I'm quoting now, "There is no doubt." Not only is this true, but, "There is no doubt that American foreign policy does adopt a separate standard for the Middle East when it comes to such values as democracy and human rights."

Well, to show that there's a double standard, you do need evidence. So he presents some evidence. The evidence is that, as he shows, the United States does not uphold such values in the Middle East, which is the area of his expertise and attention.

But it does uphold them elsewhere, strikingly, he points out, for major Muslim states if they're not in the Middle East. So that makes the point very clear.

And the most important case, of course, as he notes, is Indonesia, the largest Muslim state, which he cites, to establish the certainty of the judgment that the United States has a separate standard for the Middle East.

Well, breaking with the convention, let's look at the dogma keeping to the single and most important example cited, namely, Indonesia, where the United States upholds its values of democracy and human rights. Well, very much like Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan, this doctrine isn't totally false.

So on May 20, 1998, so that's last May, the United States did make its first statement in favor of democracy in Indonesia. Secretary of State Albright on last May 20, called upon President Suharto to resign and provide for a democratic transition. A few hours later, he resigned-- maybe coincidence, maybe it tells you something about power relations.

[LAUGHTER]

You can figure that out for yourself. So last May, we called for democracy. From the time that Suharto took power in October, 1965, until May, 1998, this gentleman was "our kind of guy," as the Clinton administration called him, while he was massacring and torturing and robbing in a quite impressive fashion-- kind of one of the world records of the modern period.

The Clinton administration even went so far as to suspend its congressionally-mandated review of Indonesia's appalling labor practices, while at the same time praising Indonesia for bringing them into closer conformity with international standards. And the Clinton administration also avoided congressional restrictions on military support for "our kind of guy"-- found various ways to pay for it out of other pockets and that sort of thing.

But it is true that last May, the United States underwent a religious conversion, and for the first time called for a democracy in Indonesia. The force of the comparison with the Middle East, however, is somewhat weakened by the fact that the same conversion occurred there at pretty much the same time.

In December, 1998, Secretary of State Albright announced, I'm quoting, "We have come to the determination that the Iraqi people would benefit if they had a government that really represented them."

So in both the Middle East and Indonesia, contrary to the thesis, the United States underwent a religious conversion in favor of the central themes of its foreign policy-- at least on paper, you can evaluate the accuracy-- about at the same time last year.

In the case of Iraq, before that, the US policy was to support what was called an iron fist. The iron fist was Saddam Hussein. For a long time, he was "our kind of guy," right through his most murderous crimes and most monstrous crimes.

After he committed his first true offense, the thesis shifted. We still wanted an iron fist. But it had to be a clone, someone who would rule with an iron fist just as Saddam Hussein had done during the period when he was "our kind of guy."

That was pretty much official policy. But on paper, at least, it's now changed. Because as of last December, we discovered that they would benefit from a government that represented them.

So in 1998 then, the United States did announce support for democracy, but both in the Middle East and Indonesia. Well, what does this tell us about the central themes of US foreign policy?

Answer-- it tells us nothing whatsoever, because these are doctrinal truths. And therefore, facts are simply irrelevant-- like, you know, God is great and merciful. You don't look at factual truths. In fact, if you look more-- well, put it aside.

[LAUGHTER]

I don't want to take too many detours. [CHUCKLES] Let's look a little more closely at Indonesia, where there is no doubt that these themes of democracy and human rights were put into practice.

There's a lot of concern right now about the possibility that Indonesia may break up into either a federation or maybe separate territories. And that prospect is very much deplored.

However, the objection to it, wherever it may be, is certainly not an objection of principle. And we can find that out quite easily if we bother to look at the irrelevant facts.

So in 1958, that happened to be official US policy-- secret, but we now know it was official US policy to break up Indonesia. And the United States, in fact, carried out a major counterinsurgency-- well, insurgency operation-- subversive operation-- probably the major one of the post Second World War period to try to break up Indonesia.

It supported a rebellion in the outer islands. Those are the islands where the oil is and where most US investments were. And that was the goal, to separate them off.

And the reason was that the national government was neutralist and independent and, in fact, was far too democratic, which was extremely worrisome to Washington. The government was-- I'm not suggesting it was a model democracy, but it was allowing parties of the poor to function.

There was a major party which represented poor peasants. And it was allowed to function. And it was doing better and better in each election.

And that was appalling news in Washington. If we look at the internal record-- most of which has been suppressed, incidentally. But bits and pieces have leaked. And there's some good scholarly studies of it-- one, in fact, by the leading founder of US/Southeast Asian studies, George Kahin at Cornell. But there's also some documents that have come out in the official channels.

The fear was that the government was, let's say, far too democratic. And it would be impossible, as they put it, to suppress the parties of the Left by ordinary democratic means. And therefore, they would have to be-- the word is "eliminated." That's the joint chiefs.

Meanwhile, the outer islands would be separated off. So inside, what's left-- bad guys have to be eliminated. The outer islands will be separated, and the US will take them over.

Well, the rebellion failed. But not before destroying whatever fabric of a parliamentary democracy existed in Indonesia. And now, after four years, we're calling for it to be restored.

After the failure of the rebellion, the United States turned to what is standard operating procedure when you want to overthrow a civilian government-- try to undermine the civilian government, but support the military. Because they're the ones who are going to overthrow the government for you.

That's absolutely standard, case after case. Pinochet is one example. The real story about what lies behind Iran-Contra is the same. And we know it had nothing to do with hostages because it was started when there were no hostages. And it's just standard operating procedure.

In Indonesia, it worked. The US tried to undermine the civilian government. It supported the military. It worked. By 1965, there was, indeed, a military coup. Suharto took over.

An army-inspired massacre then took place. The CIA described it as one of the worst massacres of the 20th century, comparable to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

It was fairly actively reported in the United States. It was a staggering bloodbath. The New York Times called it a "staggering mass slaughter." That was the Times' phrase.

Time Magazine devoted a whole section too, to what they called the "boiling blood bath," in which hundreds of thousands of people were massacred, mostly poor peasants. And the leadership of the poor peasant party was, indeed, eliminated.

It was reported accurately and with complete euphoria. There was such joy over it, that it couldn't even be suppressed. It's kind had been written out of history.

But to go back and read the journals of the time, the euphoria is total, across the intellectual spectrum. Freedom House was applauding and so on. The US government applauded.

Secretary of Defense McNamara testified before Congress that the military aid that we'd given to the Indonesian military had paid dividends. In a private letter to President Johnson, he was particularly proud of the training that Indonesian military officers received at American universities, where they had gotten the right ideas about how to carry out a mass slaughter comparable to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

The country became a paradise for investors. Suharto became the darling of the United States-- "our kind of guy." Remained so when he invaded East Timor, wiped out maybe a third or a quarter of the population. And that continues right into 1997.

Then something went wrong. He apparently committed a crime. What crime is it? Well, in fact, the crime, if you look closely, which led to the religious conversion in favor of a democratic transition here-- there were actually two crimes, two standard ones.

One crime is, he start dragging his feet about IMF orders. The IMF rules were imposing extremely serious hardships on the people of Indonesia. And Suharto was kind of slow about following orders. Crime number one.

The second crime is he just lost control. There was a democratic uprising. And the army wasn't backing him anymore. And at that point, he's useless.

So therefore, he got the advice to permit a democratic transition, in which he handed power over to his handpicked vice president. Well, that's the moment at which the United States, after 40 years, began, at least on paper, to implement its central theme of its policy in the area where there is no doubt that it has always implemented it, remember, as distinct from the Middle East.

By committing those two crimes, Suharto followed a very classic path. Another recent example is Mobutu, Saddam Hussein, Duvalier, Marcos, Somoza, Trujillo. It's kind of a long list. The same two crimes are the ones that matter. You stop following orders, you lose control-- you're out, and we're in favor of a democratic transition.

This happens routinely, regularly. But it doesn't teach you anything. You don't learn anything about policy from that, because the nature of policy is a theological dogma. And therefore, no evidence tells you anything.

Well, look a little more closely at 1958. I still promise to get back to the theme, if you're willing to hold out.

[LAUGHTER]

It's very revealing. In 1958, the National Security Council remained planning-- the body had then secret meetings, now publicized, in which John Foster Dulles, secretary of state, described the crises on the world scene.

He said there's three major crises in the world scene in 1958. One was Indonesia. The second was Algeria. The third was the Middle East.

Notice that they're all Muslim countries, but there was no clash of civilizations at that point. Those of you who are respectable intellectuals will know that now we have to soberly debate the clash of civilizations because the Cold War pretext for intervention has collapsed. And we need what's called a new paradigm. But then, we still have that pretext. So we didn't need a new paradigm.

So the three major crises were Indonesia, Algeria, and the Middle East. The fact that they were Muslims is irrelevant.

But something isn't irrelevant-- namely, they all had oil. In fact, they were all oil centers. And in fact, the effort to cut off the outer islands was related to US concerns over Middle East oil. There were some concerns that it was getting out of control and they needed some temporary supplements-- temporary, because Indonesia is nowhere near the scale of the Middle East, but significant.

Well, you look back at what happened-- and bear in mind that the United States is a global power. So its policies are usually carried out consistently in many different places.

And a lot of other things were happening in 1958. The subversion in Indonesia, the rebellion in Indonesia, was the largest of the clandestine operations-- maybe the largest ever. But there were others.

In Burma, the United States was moving to overthrow the regime supporting a Chinese nationalist army that had partially taken refuge there, and that the United States was supporting there. I won't go into the details, but that led Burma-- at that time, had an elected government-- that led to a military coup, the installation of the current military regime in Burma-- one of the most brutal in the world.

It also was instrumental in making Burma the leading heroin producer in the world, a position it now holds-- and a real horror story. The state of Massachusetts now has a kind of boycott. We can trace that right back to 1958-- right parallel to when we were carrying out the central themes of our foreign policy in Indonesia.

Another case right next door was Cambodia. Also had a neutralist government, which the United States didn't like. The US was supporting an attack on it.

That attack didn't work in 1958. But it did work in 1970-- the same forces overthrowing Prince Sihanouk's government. That led to the huge US bombing, the Khmer Rouge, everything that followed-- need not talk about that.

A third place where something was going on in 1958 was, again, right nearby in Laos. Laos had its first and last free election in 1958, came out the wrong way, party to the Left won.

The US wouldn't accept that. Military coup took place. The US installed what was called a "pro-Western neutralist." And he wasn't good enough.

So an ultra-Right general was put in. That led to a total disaster. It sort of paved the way and actually came pretty close to a world war.

It ended up with the US carrying out the heaviest bombing in history against a defenseless peasant society in northern Laos. And the effects of that are still with us.

But you wouldn't read it. You can't even read it in the US newspaper. That's a very good article on it in The Wall Street Journal by their veteran Asia correspondent about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, it's the Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal. They didn't have it in the US edition.

[SOFT LAUGHTER]

But it's quite a good article. He gives an estimate of-- there's unknown numbers of unexploded bomblets just littering the Plain of Jars.

Hundreds of millions of them were dropped. They are much worse than landmines. These are not aimed at property. They do nothing against a truck.

They're aimed to kill people. They're murder weapons. They're little, colorful things that a kid can pick up or a farmer can hit or something.

They had a failure-to-explode rate of about 20% to 30%, according to their manufacturer, Honeywell. And crummy as technology may be, it's hard to believe that that wasn't built in. But maybe. The technologists among you can assess that likelihood.

Anyway, they're supposed to have a 20% to 30% failure to explode rate, which means they're around all the time as anti-personnel weapons. And they're still there-- huge numbers of them.

According The Wall Street Journal report, the casualties may range up to 20,000 a year, of which more than half are deaths. Other numbers are less. But since nobody is counting, nobody really knows. But numbers of that kind are considered not unreasonable by The Wall Street Journal in its Asia edition.

There is a mine-clearing group-- British-based mine advisory group-- civilian-- but based, ultimately, in the British army. And other countries have come in. As the British press reports, the United States is conspicuous by its absence in the mine-clearing operation.

And furthermore, the right-wing British press is bitterly complaining over the fact that the United States, the Pentagon, refuses to provide what are called render-harmless procedures-- procedures that would defuse the mines so they wouldn't kill the people who are trying to clear them.

That's a military secret. And in fact, the whole thing is a secret in the United States. You have to work pretty hard to find out anything about it. That's a fact. So that's Laos.

Another case, in 1958 was Vietnam. I won't even talk about that.

In each case, including all of these, including Indonesia, the US interventions, which were significant, led to hideous atrocities and, in fact, destroyed the basis of democracy and, in fact, were, to a large extent, driven by that purpose, as in several of the cases I've mentioned.

However, that doesn't influence the dogma. It's still correct. There is still no doubt that, in the Middle East only, the United States doesn't live up to its high ideals, but does in these places.

Well, if you take a little more closer look at 1958, I won't go into this-- bring it up later if you like-- but the other major case was, in fact, Iraq. Iraq had a nationalist revolution, and it was pulling out of the US Anglo-American [? condominium ?] over oil.

That was going on right in 1958, and it was a major phenomenon. If you look at the documentary record then, you get a pretty good explanation of everything that's going out until today.

OK, let me drop that. One of the things that's going on today, which is quite striking and leads me to the topic, finally, is a kind of a minor aspect of the bombing last December-- the US-UK bombing.

One interesting aspect of it was that it is in blatant and flat violation of the UN Charter and international law. International law-- that's one of the three pillars of world order.

The basic principle of the UN Charter is that the threat or use of force in international affairs is banned, except under highly restricted circumstances, which don't apply, or if specifically authorized by the Security Council. Otherwise, banned-- threat or use of force.

There is no serious doubt that the US and UK just flatly ignored that. They didn't try to get UN Security Council authorization for the simple reason they knew they'd never get it. So therefore, they just bombed.

Now in the United States, there is essentially no discussion of this. I've done a fairly extensive review. And where it's discussed, as it occasionally is, it's considered a kind of a technicality, the reason being, if a reason is ever given, that we cannot allow others to veto our policy decisions, as required by the UN charter and international law. Others must stand by that, but we can't.

That is unchallenged, as far as I can discover. Interesting exercise-- try to find some challenge to that doctrine. I haven't found it. There is some in England. And there's a lot elsewhere.

So for example, in India, the Association of Jurists has a case before the world court condemning the US and Britain for war crimes. You won't read about that either. But here it's not discussed, because it's taken for granted that that's correct.

We cannot submit ourselves to international law or the UN Charter because we are a violent, lawless, criminal, rogue state, and that is right and just. That's what it means.

And there is near universal endorsement of that principle, among educated sectors at least, which should be taken as a warning by the world, and indeed is taken as a warning by the world, which doesn't like it, but can't do much about it. We're the ones who can do something about it.

And at least, judging articulate sectors, educated sectors support it. So they're not going to do anything about it.

The official stand during the bombing in December was, quoted, "that we prefer to act through our allies, but will resort to force alone if we have to." Notice that we don't even "prefer" to act through the United Nations, as required by international law in the Charter. We join our allies if they're willing to, but UN is out.