The following is a transcript of a transaction between an attendee at a lecture given by Noam Chomsky in September 1997. The question and answer are prestented below. I took some editorial liberty, cutting out some pauses and "ums" and "ahhs." Since it is a transcript, and I did the transcription, and since the mp3 below is freely available on the web, I believe this to be either public domain, or mine. Either way, it stays on this server.

An mp3 of this exchange is available through the Noam Chomsky archive at www.zmag.org/chomsky/

Questioner: I realize that a lot of our economic system has a lot of flaws, a lot of problems with it. Wage labor is not particularly pleasant. The rich have - there's a big gap between rich and poor. But, I mean, it's together now because there's been increasing standards of living in America and isn't that in one way a justification for it. For why it's still around - why capitalism, in my undestanding, has triumphed and it's still...

The same with Churchill, incidentally, who's defending Stalin in Cabinet meetings as a great man and so on and so forth. They can kill as many people as they want, that's irrelevant. The problem was then they never expected him to be attacking anybody. What they were afraid of was the economic growth which was, especially in the Third World considered quite impressive.

The same is true with Cuba. The documents have just been released, and they're interesting, on Kennedy - the Kennedy Administration - and Cuba. And it's kind of interesting to see the way the facts are being hidden. So, for example - just to illustrate - when this thing is going on at the World Trade Organization and the European Union has brought charges against the United States for violationg the WTO agreements with the Helms-Burton Act and the Cuba embargo altogether.

And the United States is isolated on that. In the international arena, the only votes for the United States are Israel - which is reflexive, that's like saying the Ukraine voted with Russia, in the old days - so Israel and Uzbekistan (for some reason, I don't why) are the only countries that voted with the United States on this. The whole European Union is against it. What was interesting is that when the United States - the United States has simply withdrawn from the World Trade Organization jurisdiction, says you have no right to deal with us, because we're the boss of the world.

But the reasons were interesting. The reasons were that this is a policy, they said - falsely - to the Kennedy Administration. We've had three decades of a policy of overthrowing the government of Cuba, and the European Union has no right to challenge our policies. That was Stuart Eisenstat, the government spokesman. Well, there was no reaction to that. Kind of interesting in itself. It's taken for granted that we have a right to overthrow another government if we feel like it and if anyone challenges that, they're off base.

But there was an interesting response, on narrower grounds, by Arthur Scheslinger, in The New York Times, he had a letter. And he said he wanted to remind his friend Stuart Eisenstat that he misunderstood thne Kennedy Administration policies. The policies, he said, were based on - I'm quoting - "Castro's troublemaking in the hemisphere and the Soviet Connection."But now that's passed so it's anachronism.

Well as Scheslinger was - here comes the discipline of the educated classes, for example the people at the Fletcher School and so on, who certainly know what I'm going to tell you right now. The documents that came out not long ago, from the Sixties, bear directly on this question. Arthrur Schlesinger was the head of the Latin American mission of the incoming Kennedy Administration, which was laying out, you know, talking about the problems and the plans for Cuba. And, there he explains what "troublemaking in the hemisphere" means and what the "Soviet Connection" means. He said, "the problem with Castro," he said - I'm quoting - "is the spread of the Casto idea of taking matters into your own hands." Which he said has great appeal to people living in Latin America, most of whom live in terrific poverty and oppression and are trying to find a more decent life. And with the model of Cuba in front of them, they're likely to do all sorts of things. So that's Castro's "troublemaking in the hemisphere."
What's the "Soviet Connection"? Well, he said that the Soviet Connection is that in the background the Soviet Union is presenting itself as a model for modernization in a single generation. That's the Soviet Connection. Well, yeah. So therefore we have to overthrow the government, 'cause that kind of troublemaking and that kind of connection.

And in fact that extends much more broadly, you know? Kennedy and McMillan, in their discussions in the early Sixties, were worried about the potential for economic growth of the Soviet Union and what it would imply. Same was true for Dulles, so it goes right back to 1917. So the facts are the opposite of what you're describing.

Q: Well, perhaps my question can be put a little differently. If this system is so bad and everything...

Q: ...why hasn't there been. Excuse me?

Q: Our system. If it's so bad, why hasn't there been greater movements to challenge it?

But when you say, "Is the system so bad?" I don't even know what that means. I mean, slave societies went on for centuries and centuries, without any challenge. Does that justify them? And in fact, if you really want to be serious about it, the slaveowners were giving arguments rather like yours. So slavery...very much like it...read, say George Fitzhugh, who was the leading spokesman for the American South, slaveowners and the south at the time when it was becoming a serious issue, like around the 1840's. He had pretty powerful arguments in favor of slavery. What he was saying is, he was saying is, look - the reason the you Northerners are against slavery is because you are anti-Negro racists. We are not racists. We think that you should take care of your subjects, so we treat them nicely and we even do that on economic grounds. Because they're our capital. You know, like if I own (to make an anachronistic analogy) if I buy a car, and you rent a car, ok? And somebody comes a year later and has a look at the two cars , ah, which car's going to be in better shape? Well, mine. Because I own it, so I'm going to take care of it. Not yours, because you rent it and you can just throw it away and get another one.

That's exactly Fitzhugh's argument. He says, look, we own people. You just rent them. So, therefore, we take care of them. We treat them well, we respect them, they're our capital. Besides, we have human relations with them, we're pre-capitalist, we still have human relations. You just treat them as tools, under wage slavery and they're much worse off. So we're the ones who are moral, you're the ones who are immoral. And in fact, under the slave system, if you take a look it was reasonably efficient. Conditions were sort of improving. People lived better, the slaves lived better, in 1850 than in 1750.

OK, everything you are saying could stand as a perfectly good argument for...not only could be a good argument for slavery, but was offered as an argument for slavery. Similar arguments were given for Bolshevism, or, take, say Fascism. Why was Hitler so popular? Hitler was, up through the Thirties at least, he was the most popular leader probably in German history. Well, the reason is he carried out a social revolution. People were living a lot better, I mean like not everybody you know? Not Jews, for example. But people, Germans were living a lot better. It was very successful. Hitler either understood or, you know, or figured out (or his advisors did) that large scale state expenditures could rescue a morbid capital economy from destruction, pretty much what American business learned during the Second World War. He was doing it. And it was a..the economy was booming, people were better off and so on. Is that an argument for fascism?