———My question is based on my experiences as a visiting scholar at an

University in Connecticut from 2003 to 2005.

As you know, that was just in the middle of the Iraq war. Interestingly, there

was no big protest movement except some debates among students at the

department. It was strange for me because the

department was supportive of your ideas and was promoting your theory of

generative

grammar. But there were no strong anti-war sentiments in the department. Could

you please share with us your opinion on how we can utilize our innate

rational faculty and make rational judgements, especially in times of

political crisis.

There are no secrets that are being kept from everyone. We understand what has

to be done as well as we can. It’s extremely difficult in any war-like nation

to stand up against state power.

The state has the capacity to engender fear and people huddle under the

umbrella of power – you could see it very clearly in the case of the Iraq war

– within a few months the war propaganda just frightened the population so

that the majority felt: “ We have to invade Iraq or they are going to destroy

us”. The Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, you know:

“… The next time we hear from Saddam, it will be a mushroom cloud over New

York…”

Well, that frightens people, especially when they don’t hear anything else.

So, when people are frightened they support violence and power, they feel they

are doing it in self-defence and it’s hard work to overcome that.

However, in the case of the Iraq war it was done pretty well. I don’t know

about Connecticut but right here for example, my students here insisted on

canceling classes and joining an anti-war demonstration the day that the war

was declared, a big demonstration in downtown Boston.

I’d say almost everyone was against the war, you couldn’t find anyone who

was in favor of the war. In fact, it is interesting that the Iraq war is the

first aggressive war in history where there was massive protest before the war

was even officially declared.

That, for example in Vietnam, that never happened. Only after many years, five

or six years of war we finally had an anti-war movement. But this was before

the invasion and it had the effect of limiting the extent to which the US

could use violence – it didn’t do anything like what it did in Vietnam for

example. There were no B52 saturation bombings of , you know, settled areas,

no chemical warfare – I mean, all the things they did in Vietnam, they couldn

’t do there, there was too much opposition.

But it’s just hard work to keep it going and to build it up. There’s

constant propaganda they have to face, there’s powerful sectors that have an

interest in supporting violence and expansion, after all in the US there are

forces behind the fact that the US spends as much on the military as the rest

of the world combined, has 800 military bases all over the world, has fleets

in every ocean, you know, it’s the only country in the world that has

anything like that. And it’s going to be a hard thing to dismantle. The

public sentiment here is that we somehow need it to protect ourselves and the

fear is astonishing.

So, for example sometimes it’s almost comical – like in 1985, 25 years ago,

Ronald Reagan who was President, declared a national emergency in the United

States because the United States was threatened by the government of Nicaragua

which had forces 2 days away from Texas. You didn’t know whether to laugh or

cry when you hear that but people didn’t laugh. It’s a frightened country,

it always has been. And so, yes, there is a lot of work.

———Do you think that the current young generation faces more difficulties than

young people at the time of the Vietnam war?

So for example take, say the Vietnam war – the biggest war in the post war

period. Vietnam was actually attacked by John F. Kennedy in 1962. A very

serious attack – bombing, chemical warfare, destroyed crops, driving people

out of the countryside to put them into concentration camps. No protest, none!

It was years before protest developed.

The attitudes have changed. By now, direct aggression is not easily acceptable

as it was then. Still there’s too much support for it, too much fear but

there’s been a lot of improvement. It just takes a lot of work to create more.

–Thank you, thank you very much.

Thank you !