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CHOMSKY ON ASIA

As part of the current FOCUSES on different countries in Asia  we
asked  Noam  Chomsky  to  comment  on  some  of the issues we are
raising. Below we  publish  his  replies  to  some  questions  we
posed...

Warren Christopher recently on a visit to China raised the  Human
Rights  issue  with  the  Chinese  government.  How has corporate
interest reacted to his 'muddying the waters'?  That  Christopher
raised  the  human rights issue in China is widely believed (less
in the US than outside it), but it is true only in the  narrowest
sense. He added to the pleas from the Clinton administration that
China  make  some  kind  of  meaningless  gesture  so  that   the
Clintonites  could  pretend  not  to  be  backtracking on another
campaign promise. There was never the slightest chance that  they
would  interfere  with  profits  by  bringing  up human rights In
general terms how do you see China fitting into  the  'New  World
Order'?   As  fot  China  and  the  NWO,  the country seems to be
splitting into a sector that is part of the Japan-based  overseas
Chinese  investment  network,  linked  to  US  multinationals and
export-import as well, with  the  usual  third  world  amenities:
super-cheap   labor,  women  burned  to  death  locked  into  toy
factories, 15,000 deaths from industrial accidents last year, and
all  sorts  of  other wondrous things that never come up in human
rights discussions, because profits are involved.  About  3/4  of
the  country  seems  to  be  either  out  of  it, or perhaps even
declining. Could be an explosion,  I  think.   The  US  has  also
lifted  the  embargo against Vietnam recently. A change of heart?
And now that Coca Cola seems to have replaced the napalm who  did
win  the  Vietnam  war?   Lifting  the  embargo has a very simple
explanation. Torturing people is fun, but making  money  is  more
important.  US  business was becoming concerned that it was being
cut out of a promising source of cheap labor, markets, resources,
so  the  government  'discovered'  that  Vietnam  has  been  more
forthcoming  about  POWs  (the  only  moral  issue   left   after
aggression  that  killed  millions  of people and destroyed three
countries - I doubt that Stalinist Russia could have gotten  away
with  what Western commissars have achieved on this one.  Who won
the Vietnam war? Over 20 years ago I pointed out that the US  had
already won - as, incidentally, was pretty well understood in the
business world. It hadn't yet achieved  maximal  objectives,  but
had  satisfied  its major war aims, to ensure that there would be
no  demonstration  affect   of   successful   development   along
independent  state-directed lines in Indochina. The documentation
on this is very clear, but unacceptable in the commissar culture,
which  insists  on  total  victory,  in  line  with  its  general
totalitarian thrust.  There are rumblings throughout  the  region
of  discontent  with  GATT  what  potential do the people have of
winning such struggles in Asia or elsewhere?   In  Asia,  there's
plenty  of  discontent with GATT. In India, they'll probably have
to ratify it at  gunpoint.  No  alternative,  though.  Power  has
shifted remarkably to absolutist, unaccountable institutions of a
scale that would  have  made  any  classical  liberal  shrink  in
horror.  National states are generally overwhelmed, and even rich
and powerful ones like the US are  fairly  restricted  in  policy
planning. A long story.

































































