Noam Chomsky on Syria, Bahrain, Turkey, the Security Council and Education [Part 2 of 2]

And the United States. There was an attempt in Saudi Arabia to have a Friday demonstration but the security presence was so strong that people were afraid to go in the streets. In Bahrain, it was pretty brutally crushed by Saudi-led forces coming in. The US supports all of this so it keeps quiet. The main concern of the US and its allies is the oil producing states. Bahrain is not a main oil producer, but it's part of the oil producing system so they don't want any trouble there.   In Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the Emirates, everything is under control, so no Arab Spring.   Can anything ever happen there? Well, it's pretty hard to see.   Remember, Saudi Arabia is a very rough place. First of all, it's the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world. The US and Britain have always supported that. They've traditionally supported and fostered radical Islam as a weapon against secular nationalism. And also this is the guys with the oil, so of course the West is going to support them. And with that constellation of forces, it's not easy to see how an uprising could take place but you never know.   Well, that's exactly what I was talking about.  For example, I was talking mainly about well-known writers, academics, professionals, and publishers who are constantly engaged in civil disobedience and I think that Turkey should be proud of having an intellectual class like that.  But they go in and out of jail.   In fact, the first time I went to Turkey, it was essentially to participate as a co-defender in a trial of a publisher. There was a lot of international publicity so they kinda… …the trials are a total fraud so they do what they want… so they put it off on some pretext and then got him later.   But if I hadn't been there, I'm sure he would have spent years in jail. And now there is a very repressive period.   Actually, there's a background. 10 years ago, which happens to be when I was there, it was very repressive. They were just coming out of vicious period of counterinsurgency in southeastern Turkey, which killed 10,000s of people, destroyed 1,000s of towns and villages, created every kind of torture and horror you can think of, and millions of refugees. All supported by the US incidentally. The US was pouring in military aid, even as the atrocities increased. But over the past 10 years, it's been eased.   There has been considerable progress, not anything like what it aught to be, but quite a lot. And it's a much freer country now. But there is, now, a rising repression of the kind you described.   I don't know anybody, who's familiar at all with Syria, who thinks that military intervention would make any sense. I mean, there are people who know the region in Syria. The main ones are Patrick Seale, one of the main historians of Syria or Jonathon Steele, who is a British correspondent, Charles Glass, who's an American correspondent. In fact, anyone, who I know of, who cares at all about Syria and not just kind of shouting self-glorification, think that military intervention is only going to make it worse. The negotiations are going to be hard but it's the only way that can save Syria from devastating internal conflict. It was pretty much the same in Libya. It's not going to be reported here, but Britain, France and the United States were pretty isolated in the world. Almost the entire world was calling for diplomacy and negotiations to fend off the likely humanitarian catastrophe, which in fact took place and is still going on. But you couldn't report it here, and we just praise ourselves for our magnificence. And surely that is at least some part of the reason why China and Russia don't want to sign onto a UN resolution.   They were just tricked last time. The UN resolution didn't call for anything like what the three imperial powers immediately did so they felt they got burned. There's no good solution I can think of, but military intervention is probably the worst. Well, first of all, you have to remember who uses the veto. In the early days of the UN, when the US was so overwhelming dominant in the world and everyone did what it said, the Security Council was used as a weapon against the Russians, so the Russians vetoed everything.   Though the 1950's that changed. Decolonization made the UN more representative of the world and other countries reconstructed from the war. By the mid-60s, I think 1966, the United States casted its first veto.   Since then it is far in the lead in vetoes, way ahead of anybody else.  Britain is second and nobody else is even close. So if you got rid of the veto, what you would be doing, in effect, is getting rid of the US veto - the US and British veto.   Well, the US and Britain are going to accept that. So if you got rid of the veto, they would just do whatever they like. Just like the US does anyways.   But that's what power is. If you have power and a kind of obedient, quiet intellectual class, not like Turkey, then you can do what you like.   The events that have been memorable for me are things done by what are called "ordinary people," poor people, you know, standing up for their rights. And joining in those is memorable.   They don't have anything to do with the economy.  I mean, this goes back to the 70s. A couple years ago, I saw, kind of a dramatic example of that.   I was giving talks in Mexico and I talked at the National University.   It's a poor country but it's a very good university: high quality, lively, active student body, good, reasonable facilities.  No big football stadiums and things but…   And I happened, after speaking there, I went to California.  It's one of the richest places in the world. I got there just at the point that it was announced that the funding of the state university system, that less than half of it was coming from the state, the majority from tuition. And this is part of an effort, that is pretty clear, to essentially privatized the great universities and turn them into sort of IV League schools for the relatively privileged. And turn the rest of the system into, maybe vocational training to get people jobs in the California workforce but not a real education.   This was the greatest public education system in the world. Well, Mexico is a poor country; tuition is free.   California is extremely rich. But you've got to sook people of $10,000s of dollars for tuition. I happen to have 3 grandchildren in college now and a couple of days ago I got a letter from one of the colleges saying tuition is going up to, I think, $35,000USD and another $10,000USD for room and board.   You can't go to college unless you have either this wealth in the background or you're willing to end up with this huge debt.   Well, debts have a point.  They are a technique of control.   It starts in the 70s when there was a lot of concern about, what was called, actually in liberal circles, "failure of the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young."   Young people are not being indoctrinated properly by the schools, universities, churches, etc. So you have to introduce more discipline. Well that's a terrific disciplinary technique.   Whatever your goals in life were, if you come out of college with a huge debt over your head, there are things you just have to do in order to pay off that debt instead of whatever you wanted to do.   So it's a technique of control. Actually in Mexico there was an attempt, about 10 years ago, to add slight, low tuition.   There was a national student strike and the government backed off. So tuition is still free.   And it's free in other countries. Like Germany is a rich country and tuition is free.   In fact in the US, itself, the period of the greatest growth in the country, in history in fact, was the 50s and 60s.   It was not only very high economic growth, but it was also the period which laid the bases for the high tech economy.   That's where your computer was designed and the Internet and the IT revolution and so on. Education wasn't totally free but it was largely free.   The G.I. Bill, for example, provided free education for a huge number of people who never would have been able to make it to college before.   It was good for them and it was very good for the country.   The systems are being turned into advanced, advanced colleges, Berkeley-type colleges for the rich and nothing much for everyone else. which goes on in all sorts of ways and this is one of them. And it also imposes discipline. Student debt is now over one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000 USD).   That's huge.   And it's a great technique of control. But I don't see how it can be considered an economic problem.