NOAM CHOMSKY interviewed by JOHN VEIT
HT: You’ve defined the War on Drugs as an instrument of population control. How does it accomplish that?
CHOMSKY: Population control is actually a term I borrowed from the counterinsurgency literature of the Kennedy years. The main targets at the time were Southeast Asia and Latin America, where there was an awful lot of popular ferment. They recognized that the population was supporting popular forces that were calling for all kinds of social change that the United States simply could not tolerate. And you could control people in a number of ways. One way was just by terror and violence, napalm bombing and so on, but they also worked on developing other kinds of population-control measures to keep people subjugated, ranging from propaganda to concentration camps. Propaganda is much more effective when it is combined with terror.
You have the same problem domestically, where the public is constantly getting out of control. You have to carry out measures to insure that they remain passive and apathetic and obedient, and don’t interfere with privilege or power. It’s a major theme of modern democracy. As the mechanisms of democracy expand, like enfranchisement and growth, the need to control people by other means increases.
So the growth of corporate propaganda in the United States more or less parallels the growth of democracy, for quite straightforward reasons. It’s not any kind of secret. It is discussed very frankly and openly in business literature and academic social-science journals. You have to “fight the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” in their standard phraseology, to indoctrinate and regiment them in the way that armies regiment their bodies. Those are population control measures. This engineering or manufacture of consent is the essence of democracy, because you have to insure that ignorant and meddlesome outsiders — meaning we, the people — don’t interfere with the work of the serious people who run public affairs in the interests of the privileged.
HT: How does the War on Drugs fit into this?
CHOMSKY: Well, one of the traditional and obvious ways of controlling people in every society, whether it’s a military dictatorship or a democracy, is to frighten them. If people are frightened, they’ll be willing cede authority to their superiors who will protect them: “OK, I’ll let you run my life in order to protect me,” that sort of reasoning.
So the fear of drugs and the fear of crime is very much stimulated by state and business propaganda. The National Justice Commission repeatedly points out that crime in the United States, while sort of high, is not off the spectrum for industrialized societies. On the other hand, fear of crime is far beyond other societies, and mostly stimulated by various propaganda. The Drug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from who we have to protect ourselves. It is also, a direct form of control of what are called “dangerous classes,” those superfluous people who don’t really have a function contributing to profit-making and wealth. They have to be somehow taken care of.
HT: In some other countries you just hang the rabble.
CHOMSKY: Yes, but in the U.S. you don’t kill them, you put them in jail. The economic policies of the 1980’s sharply increased inequality, concentrating such economic growth as there was, which was not enormous, in very few hands. The top few percent of the population got extremely wealthy as profits went through the roof, and meanwhile median-income wages were stagnating or declining sharply since the ’70’s. You’re getting a large mass of people who are insecure, suffering from difficulty to misery, or something in between. A lot of them are basically going to be arrested, because you have to control them.
HT: It’s absolutely true, but how do you prove it?
CHOMSKY: Just by looking at the trend lines for marijuana. Marijuana use was peaking in the late ’70’s, but there was not much criminalization. You didn’t go to jail for having marijuana then because the people using it were nice folks like us, the children of the rich. You don’t throw them into jail any more than you throw corporate executives into jail — even though corporate crime is more costly and dangerous than street crime. But then in the ’80’s the use of various “unhealthy” substances started to decline among more educated sectors: marijuana and tobacco smoking, alcohol, red meat, coffee, this whole category of stuff. On the other hand, usage remained steady among poorer sectors of the population. In the United States, poor and black correlation — they’re not identical, but there’s a correlation — and in poor, black and hispanic sectors of the population the use of such substances remained steady.
So take a look at those trends. When you call for a War on Drugs, you know exactly who you’re going to pick up: poor black people. You’re not going to pick up rich white people: you don’t go after them anyway. In the upper-middle class suburb where I live, if somebody goes home and sniffs cocaine, police don’t break into their house.
So there are many factors making the Drug War a war against the poor, largely poor people of color. And those are the people they have to get rid of. During the period these economic policies were being instituted, the incarceration rate was shooting up, but crime wasn’t, it was steady or declining. But imprisonment went way up. By the late ’80’s, in terms of imprisoning our population, we were way ahead of the rest of the world, way ahead of any other industrial society.
HT: Who benefits from incarcerating young black males?
CHOMSKY: A lot of people. Poor people are basically superfluous for wealth production, and therefore the wealthy want to get rid of them. The rich also frighten everyone else, because if you’re afraid of these people, then you submit to state authority. But beyond that, it’s a state industry. Since the 1930’s, every businessman has understood that a private capitalist economy must have massive state subsidies; the only question is what form that state subsidy will take? In the United States the main form has been through the military system. The most dynamic aspects of the economy — computers, the Internet, the aeronautical industry, pharmaceuticals — have fed off the military system. But the crime-control industry, as it’s called by criminologists, is becoming the fastest-growing industry in America.
And it’s state industry, publicly funded. It’s the construction industry, the real estate industry, and also high tech firms. It’s gotten to a sufficient scale that high-technology and military contractors are looking to it as a market for techniques of high-tech control and surveillance, so you can monitor what people do in their private activities with complicated electronic devices and supercomputers: monitoring their telephone calls and urinalyses and so forth. In fact, the time will probably come when this superfluous population can be locked up in private apartments, not jails, and just monitored to track when they do something wrong, say the wrong thing, go the wrong direction.
HT: House arrest for the masses.
CHOMSKY: It’s enough of an industry so that the major defense-industry firms are interested; you can read about it in The Wall Street Journal. The big law firms and investment houses are interested: Merrill Lynch is floating big loans for prison construction. If you take the whole system, it’s probably approaching the scale of the Pentagon.
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