Radio Havana Interviews Chomsky

By Noam Chomsky

Telephone interview by Bernie Dwyer for
http://www.cubadebate.cu with
Professor Noam Chomsky
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 28th August 2003.

http://www.countercurrents.org/chomsky-cuba050903.htm

[excerpts]

... The mass media, the business world, and the intellectual community in general, tend to line up in support of concentrated power - which in the US is state and corporate power. And the same is true on the issues of Cuba. For example almost nobody knows the history of US terrorism in Cuba since 1959. Terrorism is a big word. Everybody talks about it. You wouldn't find a person in a thousand or maybe a hundred thousand who is aware of the fact that the Kennedy administration intensified the on-going terrorist operations (against Cuba) and pressed them to such a point that they almost led to a terminal nuclear war and then they went on for years after that. In fact they are still going on. Almost no one knows that. It's not covered....

... The US is the only country in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism. The words they used were: 'unlawful use of force' in their war against Nicaragua. That's international terrorism. There were two Security Council resolutions supporting that judgment. The US of course vetoed them. And that was no small terrorist war. It practically destroyed the country. US terrorism against Cuba has been going on since 1959 and the fact that the US can label Cuba a terrorist state when it has been carrying out a major terrorist campaign against Cuba since 1959, picking up heavily in the'60s and peaking in the '70s in fact, that's pretty astonishing.

But I think if you do a careful study of the American media and intellectual journals and intellectual opinions and so on, you will find nothing about this and not a word suggesting that there is anything strange about it. And if you look at the scholarly literature on terrorism by people like Walter Laqueur and other respected scholars, and take a look at the index, you find Cuba mentioned often and if you look at the page references, what is mentioned is suspicions that Cuba may have been involved in some terrorist actions, but what you will not find is a reference to the very well documented US terrorist operations against Cuba.

And that is not controversial. We have reams of declassified government documents on it. There is extensive scholarship on it, but it cannot enter into public discourse. It's a pretty remarkable achievement, not just of the media but of the intellectual community altogether. It's not very different in Europe. If you did an investigation in England you would probably find pretty much the same....