AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour, Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident,
linguist, author, institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His latest book is Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration
of Wealth & Power.
Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Noam Chomsky, I’d like to ask you about something that’s been in the
news a lot lately.
Obviously, all the cable channels, that’s all they talk about these days, is the whole
situation of Russia’s supposed intervention in American elections.
For a country that’s intervened in so many governments and so many elections around the
world, that’s kind of a strange topic.
But I know you’ve referred to this as a joke.
Could you give us your view on what’s happening and why there’s so much emphasis on this
particular issue?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s a pretty remarkable fact that—first of all, it is a joke.
Half the world is cracking up in laughter.
The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections.
It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships.
Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under
Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man
Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways.
So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock
in the world.
So why are the Democrats focusing on this?
In fact, why are they focusing so much attention on the one element of Trump’s programs which
is fairly reasonable, the one ray of light in this gloom: trying to reduce tensions with
Russia?
That’s—the tensions on the Russian border are extremely serious.
They could escalate to a major terminal war.
Efforts to try to reduce them should be welcomed.
Just a couple of days ago, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jack Matlock, came out
and said he just can’t believe that so much attention is being paid to apparent efforts
by the incoming administration to establish connections with Russia.
He said, "Sure, that’s just what they ought to be doing."
So, meanwhile, this one topic is the primary locus of concern and critique, while, meanwhile,
the policies are proceeding step by step, which are extremely destructive and harmful.
So, you know, yeah, maybe the Russians tried to interfere in the election.
That’s not a major issue.
Maybe the people in the Trump campaign were talking to the Russians.
Well, OK, not a major point, certainly less than is being done constantly.
And it is a kind of a paradox, I think, that the one issue that seems to inflame the Democratic
opposition is the one thing that has some justification and reasonable aspects to it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, because the Democrats feel that that’s the reason, somehow,
that they lost the election.
Interesting that James Comey this week said he is investigating Trump campaign collusion
with Russia, when it was Comey himself who could have—might well have been partly responsible
for Hillary Clinton’s defeat, when he said that he was investigating her, while, we now
have learned, at the same time he was investigating Donald Trump, but never actually said that.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, you can understand why the Democratic Party managers want to try
to find some blame for the fact—for the way they utterly mishandled the election and
blew a perfect opportunity to win, handed it over to the opposition.
But that’s hardly a justification for allowing the Trump policies to slide by quietly, many
of them not only harmful to the population, but extremely destructive, like the climate
change policies, and meanwhile focus on one thing that could become a step forward, if
it was adjusted to move towards serious efforts to reduce growing and dangerous tensions right
on the Russian border, where they could blow up.
NATO maneuvers are taking place hundreds of yards from the Russian border.
The Russian jet planes are buzzing American planes.
This—something could get out of hand very easily.
Both sides, meanwhile, are building up their military forces, adding—the U.S. is—one
thing that the Russians are very much concerned about is the so-called anti-ballistic missile
installation that the U.S. is establishing near the Russian border, allegedly to protect
Europe from nonexistent Iranian missiles.
Nobody seriously believes that.
This is understood to be a first strike threat.
These are serious issues.
People like William Perry, who has a distinguished career and is a nuclear strategist and is
no alarmist at all, is saying that we’re back to the—this is one of the worst moments
of the Cold War, if not worse.
That’s really serious.
And efforts to try to calm that down would be very welcome.
And we should bear in mind it’s the Russian border.
It’s not the Mexican border.
There’s no Warsaw Pact maneuvers going on in Mexico.
And that’s a border that the Russians are quite reasonably sensitive about.
They’ve practically been destroyed several times the last century right through that
region.