[David Barsamian] This is a very different question on the nature of evil. You’re an empiricist, a scientist working with objective material. You’ve discussed US atrocities in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, you’ve written about soldiers who throw babies up in the air and then bayonet them. The question arises: Many of these soldiers are fathers and brothers who have held babies in their arms. How could they be reduced to that? Also, as an addendum, you’ve said that individuals are not evil but that institutions are. Isn’t that a cop-out?
[Noam
Chomsky] First of all, I’ve very rarely
talked about atrocities committed by soldiers.
I’ve explained why. The reason is
that soldiers, in a situation of conflict, are frightened. The options open to them are very few. They can be enraged. These are situations in which people can’t
use their normal human instincts. You
can find a few sentences in which I’ve quoted things of this sort from human
rights groups, but I don’t harp on it and I almost never discuss it.
To take one case, I was asked by the New York Review to write an article about the My Lai incident when it broke, and I did
write such an article, but I had about three sentences on My Lai in which I
pointed out exactly these things, that the actions carried out by half-crazed
GI’s in the field don’t tell you very much.
The much more serious question, I think, is how people who are subject to
no threat, who are comfortable, educated and if they don’t know what’s going on
it’s because of a conscious decision not to know what’s going on, how such
people can, in the quiet of their living rooms, tolerate and support and back
horrifying atrocities, and plan them in their well-appointed offices. That’s the real evil, far worse than what’s
being done by soldiers in the field. As
to how soldiers can do it: apart from the condition of combat, which are never
very pretty and are in fact life-threatening, apart from that, you’re talking
about young kids, teenagers, who in fact are easily indoctrinated and can be
turned into killers.[1]
”Elite
Power and the Responsibility of Intellectuals” (15 February 1988)
[1] See
Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent: Collected Interviews
with David Barsamian, 1984-1996 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), p.
124. This interview first appeared in
But there are commanders and a chain of commanding the field. This is particularly true of e.g. Russian army field operations it seems. Where are these 1 step removed and 2 steps removed professional soldiers? There is a risk of minimizing the responsibility of these captains, lieutenants and majors in Chomskys comment as published.
ReplyDeleteThat is to say that the actions of soldiers is highly controlled especially in battlefield conditions. Are we not then looking at both policy and professional practice (rehearsed in Syria and elsewhere), not just abstract policymaking and the biases of a TV audience?
ReplyDeleteI believe Chomsky takes officer activity into account: for example the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968 was brought on by William Calley, a Lieutenant. Among the 504 people killed were 182 women (17 of whom were pregnant) and 173 children (56 of whom were infants). These American crimes in Vietnam, along with the Russian brutality in Bucha, Ukraine, demonstrate the error of Rousseau: man is not necessarily good, and humanity (such as it is) is capable of many things, including great evil. I expect the war in Ukraine might therefore reinforce a kind of Hobbesian “war of all against all” ethos. We see that in the Weimar Republic with the political/juridical thinking of Carl Schmitt (who was at one time a prominent Nazi) again in vogue – in the USA and China - since 9/11.
ReplyDeleteFrom my readings, I do not think “the actions of soldiers is highly controlled … in battlefield conditions.”