Noam Chomsky: Russia Isn’t Influencing US
Elections—but Israel Definitely Is
Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now
Russia Isn’t Influencing US Elections—but Israel
Definitely Is
Take, say, the huge issue of interference in our
pristine elections. Did the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of
overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of the world, that’s almost
a joke.
First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our
elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the
balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with
enormous support.
Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms
anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime
minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even
informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to
try to undermine the president’s policies—what happened with Obama and
Netanyahu in 2015.
Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of
Congress trying to—calling on them to reverse U.S. policy, without even informing
the president? And that’s just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence.
So if
you happen to be interested in influence of—foreign influence on elections,
there are places to look. But even that is a joke.
I mean, one of the most elementary principles of a
functioning democracy is that elected representatives should be responsive to
those who elected them. There’s nothing more elementary than that. But we know
very well that that is simply not the case in the United States.
There’s ample
literature in mainstream academic political science simply comparing voters’
attitudes with the policies pursued by their representatives, and it shows that
for a large majority of the population, they’re basically disenfranchised.
Their own representatives pay no attention to their voices.
They listen to the
voices of the famous 1 percent—the rich and the powerful, the corporate sector.
The elections—Tom Ferguson’s stellar work has demonstrated, very conclusively,
that for a long period, way back, U.S. elections have been pretty much bought.
You can predict the outcome of a presidential or congressional election with
remarkable precision by simply looking at campaign spending. That’s only one
part of it.
Lobbyists practically write legislation in congressional offices.
In massive ways, the concentrated private capital, corporate sector, super
wealth, intervene in our elections, massively, overwhelmingly, to the extent
that the most elementary principles of democracy are undermined. Now, of
course, all that is technically legal, but that tells you something about the
way the society functions. So, if you’re concerned with our elections and how
they operate and how they relate to what would happen in a democratic society,
taking a look at Russian hacking is absolutely the wrong place to look.
Well,
you see occasionally some attention to these matters in the media, but very
minor as compared with the extremely marginal question of Russian hacking.
And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on
issues on which what Trump says, for whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So,
he’s perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia.
Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes—Russia shouldn’t
refuse to deal with the United States because the U.S. carried out the worst
crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia
has done. But they shouldn’t refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we
shouldn’t refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may have
carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd.
We have to move
towards better—right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions,
that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear
war, terminal for the species and life on Earth.
We’re very close to that. Now,
we could ask why.
First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly,
we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly
under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the
Russian border, expanded further under Obama.
The U.S. has offered to bring
Ukraine into NATO. That’s the kind of a heartland of Russian geostrategic
concerns. So, yes, there’s tensions at the Russian border—and not, notice, at
the Mexican border. Well, those are all issues that should be of primary
concern.
The fate of—the fate of organized human society, even of the survival
of the species, depends on this.
How much attention is given to these things as
compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem
to me the fundamental criticisms of the media.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political
dissident, author and linguist, now a laureate professor in the Department of
Linguistics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He taught for 50 years at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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