Chomsky on Power and Hope

Noam Chomsky (Photo By John Anderson)

More than 2,000 people gathered in (and beside, and outside) UT's LBJ Auditorium Sunday to hear writer, activist, and MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky deliver an address on the subject, "Unending Wars: The U.S. and the Middle East." Hours before Chomsky's noon lecture, the crowd had become its own story: A line formed outside the LBJ building at 7:30am, and the auditorium was filled beyond its 1,000-person capacity within 45 minutes of the 10am opening. By 11am the overflow Bass Lecture Hall next door was jammed with another 300 or more, and the surrounding hallways had become virtually impassable -- organizers set up loudspeakers wherever they could, including the courtyard outside, to enable as many people as possible to stay and at least hear Chomsky speak.

Bob Jensen, UT journalism professor and one of the event organizers, cheerfully pointed out that when former President George H.W. Bush was the featured LBJ speaker a few years ago, the auditorium filled only to about two-thirds capacity. "From the looks of it," declared Jensen with a smile, "it means that we're going to win -- and soon." Chomsky spoke and answered questions for three hours, and when he left the podium to his third standing ovation, very few members of the audience had departed.

Jensen's remark typified the contradictory atmosphere of the day: tremendous enthusiasm for Chomsky's visit, his first to Austin in 20 years, and a sobering sense that world affairs are at a crisis point, heightened by the intensifying Israeli/Palestinian bloodshed, and U.S. threats of war against Iraq. Focusing primarily on the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East since World War II, Chomsky was characteristically soft-spoken but relentless. Drawing almost exclusively from published government documents and press reports of official statements (here and abroad), he described a consistent and public (although unadvertised) U.S. strategy of expanding direct and indirect control of Persian Gulf resources -- either through client states ("cops on the beat") like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, or directly when necessary, as in the ongoing decade of military and economic action against Iraq. Citing a range of U.S. government sources, including standard military and intelligence planning documents, Chomsky argued that for every U.S. administration from Eisenhower through Bush, Clinton, and Bush, "The issue is not access to oil [for U.S. use], and it never has been. The issue is the need to control that resource as a source of strategic power."

During an address to the Texas Civil Rights Project banquet Saturday night, Chomsky had replied quietly but bluntly to a question about the historical decline of empires by noting the determination of the U.S. to militarize outer space: "My own speculation is that the current empire will collapse, but as a consequence of its destruction of the world." Yet in each of his talks and a Sunday morning press conference, Chomsky reiterated the growth of U.S. dissent over the last 40 years, our common obligation to oppose aggression and injustice, and the contrast between the staggering military capacity of the U.S. government and its "fragile system of power" against popular democratic movements. "We have the power to change these things, here in the U.S.," Chomsky concluded. "That's where the real hope lies, and I don't think there's another one."