Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

^7. Extraordinary Lives

Laray Polk: In your office, among all the reference materials, you have a rather large black-and-white photograph of Bertrand Russell. Did you have the opportunity to meet him?

Noam Chomsky: We never met. Our only contact was in 1967, when we were about to issue the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” advocating support for resistance, not just protest, to the Vietnam War. I was delegated to contact well-known figures to ask for their support. The first person I wrote to was Russell, who answered immediately, agreeing to sign the statement.

How much impact do you think Russell’s nonproliferation work has had?[83]

It did not have as much of an impact as it should have. Russell was vilified in the US; there’s a good account in the book Bertrand Russell’s America.[84] Einstein, who often expressed similar views, was generally treated as a nice man who ought to go back to his study in Princeton. Nevertheless, it doubtless had some impact within those circles, then quite narrow, that were seeking to end the severe and immediate threat of nuclear weapons. In later years, that movement grew considerably, becoming a very powerful popular movement by the 1980s, probably a major factor in inducing Reagan to introduce his “Star Wars” fantasies so as to ward off protest. There’s good work on this by Lawrence Wittner.[85]

Another scientist comes to mind, Linus Pauling, also a signatory to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. I think you’ve mentioned having a great amount of respect for Pauling.

Pauling was a great scientist, but also a very dedicated and effective peace advocate. It was in the latter connection that I met him several times, on panels concerned with issues of war, aggression, and nuclear threats.

Also along these lines, you’ve mentioned Peggy Duff and her work with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[86]

Peggy Duff was a remarkable woman. In the late 1940s, she was active in trying to end Britain’s shameful treatment of POWs after the war’s end. She then became a leading figure in the CND, and soon went on to become the driving force in organizing the international movement of opposition to the Vietnam War, and also other crucial matters, such as the brutal denial of elementary rights to Palestinians. She organized international conferences, and much else, and also published very valuable and informative studies of ongoing events, bringing out a great deal of material that was missing or distorted in the general media.[87] By rights, she should have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The statement you mentioned, “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” was at the heart of a legal case in which you were named a co-conspirator. Is this the same incident of potential imprisonment that prompted your wife Carol to go back to school in case she had to become the sole breadwinner?[88]

Well before the trials were announced it was likely that the government would prosecute those who they regarded—mostly wrongly—as leaders of the resistance. That’s why Carol went back to school after sixteen years (we had three kids to support). I was an unindicted co-conspirator in the first trial, but on the opening day the prosecuting attorney announced that I would be the primary defendant in the next trial—eliciting an objection from defense counsel. The reason why I was a co-conspirator and others were conspirators was comical, but in fact the entire government case was worthy of the Marx brothers, and provided some interesting insight into the incapacity of the political police to comprehend dissent and resistance.[89]

Pauling said of his nonproliferation work, “As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility to make these dangers known.”[90] It seems that being honest with the science is not enough, that one has to also be engaged in international affairs and have a willingness to explore alternative definitions of what security means. Perhaps it could even be described as possessing a social direction that is different from the aspirations of politicians and others in the expert class.

It illustrates a basic moral principle. Privilege confers opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibility. Expert knowledge is one component of privilege. Politicians may sometimes have special knowledge, but that cannot be assumed.

Russell, Pauling, Duff, and others like them had integrity, and were willing to act in accord with decent values. In every society I know of since classical times there have been honest dissidents, usually a fringe, almost always punished in one or another way. The kind of punishment depends on the nature of the society. In contrast, obedience and subordination to power are typically honored within the society, even though often condemned by history (or in enemy states).[91]

In 1967 George Steiner wrote an open letter in reference to your essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” His letter and your response were published together in the New York Review of Books. Is there anything memorable or significant to you about that exchange?[92]

What is significant is that it took place. There was a good deal of soul-searching then, primarily among young people, about the course to follow as the Vietnam War moved on from major war crime to utter obscenity. And it reached to a certain extent to privileged intellectuals, the kind of people who read and wrote in the Review. One question—proper, and difficult—was whether to move on from protest to direct resistance, with all of its uncertainties and likely personal costs. Actually I’d been involved in it for several years before, in a tamer version: efforts to organize a national tax-resistance campaign in protest against the war. But by 1967, things were moving to a new stage.

What has changed and what has stayed the same since 1967?

One important change is that there have been a lot of victories, sometimes reaching to issues that were barely on the agenda not very long ago, like gay rights. And consciousness has greatly changed in many domains. Easy to list: rights of minorities, women, even rights of nature; opposition to aggression and terror; and much else.

It’s instructive to look back to see the horrendous atrocities that were easily tolerated then, but not today. It’s also instructive to look back at some of the dramatic moments of the ’60s, for example Paul Potter’s SDS speech at the first major mobilization in 1965, where he roused the crowd by declaring that the time had come to “name the system”; he couldn’t go on to name it, though now there would be no such hesitation. He opened by saying that “most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort.”[93] Few young activists would say that now.

The achievements of the activism of the ’60s and their aftermath leave a significant legacy: it is possible to go on to take up what was cut off then. The fate of the civil rights movement is worth remembering. In the standard version, it peaked in 1963 with the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the usual focus of the rhetoric on MLK Day. But King didn’t go home then. He went on to confront the burning issues of the day: the Vietnam War and the plight of the poor, with organizing in urban Chicago and elsewhere.[94] The luster quickly dimmed among Northern liberals. It’s fine to condemn racist Alabama sheriffs, but state crimes and class issues are off-limits. Few remember King’s speech in 1968, shortly before he was assassinated. He was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting a strike of sanitation workers, and was intending to lead a March on Washington to found a movement of the poor and to call for meaningful legislation to address their plight.[95] The march took place, led by his widow, Coretta King. It passed through the sites of bitter struggle in the South and reached Washington, where the marchers set up a tent encampment, Resurrection City.[96] On orders of the most liberal administration since FDR, it was raided and destroyed by the police in the middle of the night, and the marchers were driven out of Washington.

The unfulfilled tasks remain, by now with new urgency after the disastrous economic policies of the past generation. And they can be undertaken from a higher plane.

Many of the old difficulties remain. Movements arise and grow and disappear leaving little organizational structure or memory. Most activism begins from almost zero. It also tends to be separated from other initiatives in a highly atomized society that is in some ways demoralized and frightened, despite its extraordinary wealth, privilege, and opportunities. And there are now questions of decent survival that cannot be shunted aside: the persistent danger of nuclear war, and the threat of environmental disaster, already approaching, and likely to become far more severe if we persist on our present course of denial.