Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky Read Online Free Page B

just done a dissertation on a lot of this stuff, would agree, but my impression from reading the secret record over a wide range of areas is that you virtually never find anything in there that had any connection to security whatsoever. The main purpose of secrecy is just to make sure that the general population here doesn’t know what’s going on.
    S TEPHEN Z UNES : I concur completely .
    Yeah, that’s your impression too? And you know, I’m at M.I.T., so I’m always talking to the scientists who work on missiles for the Pentagon and so on, and these guys also don’t see any reason for it. Like, Stark Draper, who runs the big missile lab at M.I.T. and who invented inertial guidance and so on, says publicly, and he’s told me privately, that he doesn’t see any purpose in security classifications—because he says the only effect is to prevent American scientists from communicating adequately. As far as he’s concerned, you can take the instruction book for building the most advanced missiles and just give it to China or Russia, he doesn’t care. First of all, he says they can’t do anything with it, because they don’t have the technological and industrial level that would enable them to do anything. And if they did have that level, they’d have invented it too, so you’re not telling them anything. All you’re doing is making it harder for American scientists to communicate.
    As for the secret diplomatic record, it’s difficult to think of anything that has been released that was ever a secret which actually involved security—they involve marginalizing the population, that’s what government secrets are for.
    W OMAN : You could apply that insight to the Rosenberg trial in the 1950s—they were supposed to have endangered the world by selling the Russians nuclear secrets. [Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for treason by the U.S. government in 1953.]
    Yeah—the Rosenberg execution had nothing to do with national security; it was part of trying to destroy the political movements of the Thirties. If you want to traumatize people, treason trials are an extreme way—if there are spies running around in our midst, then we’re really in trouble, we’d better just listen to the government and stop thinking.
    Look, every government has a need to frighten its population, and one way of doing that is to shroud its workings in mystery. The idea that a government has to be shrouded in mystery is something that goes back to Herodotus [ancient Greek historian]. You read Herodotus, and he describes how the Medes and others won their freedom by struggle, and then they lost their freedom when the institution of royalty was invented to create a cloak of mystery around power.   30 See, the idea behind royalty was that there’s this other species of individuals who are beyond the norm and who the people are not supposed to understand. That’s the standard way you cloak and protect power: you make it look mysterious and secret, above the ordinary person—otherwise why should anybody accept it? Well, they’re willing to accept it out of fear that some great enemies are about to destroy them, and because of that they’ll cede their authority to the Lord, or the King, or the President or something, just to protect themselves. That’s the way governments work—that’s the way any system of power works—and the secrecy system is part of it.
    Clandestine terror is a different part of it—if the public will not support direct intervention and violence, then you have to keep it secret from them somehow. So in a way, I think the scale of clandestine government activities is a pretty good measure of the popular dissidence and activism in a country—and clandestine activities shot way up during the Reagan period. That tells you something right there about popular “empowerment”: it’s a reflection of people’s power that the government was forced underground. That’s a victory, you know.
    W OMAN : Doesn’t