The Salon Interview with Noam Chomsky
- - - - - - - - - - - -

Noam Chomsky The nation's most implacable critic of
U.S. foreign policy argues that the war is unjust,
America is the biggest terrorist state and
intellectuals always support official violence.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Suzy Hansen

Jan. 16, 2002 | Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag will
always be remembered as the two leading American
intellectuals who said the wrong thing after Sept. 11.

For Sontag, it was her now infamous New Yorker magazine
slap at the idea that the terrorists were cowards. For
Chomsky, it was statements like this one: "The
terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they
may not reach the level of many others, for example,
the bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext,
destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing
unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the
U.S. blocked an inquiry at the U.N. and no one cares to
pursue it)." To many, it seemed Chomsky was shrugging
off the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States because
our country commits atrocities just as terrible and
often worse.

To those abroad who consider American power grossly
abusive, Chomsky is a voice of reason -- an American
activist who reads their newspapers, keeps track of
their suffering and never lets his countrymen forget
about it. In his 2000 book, "A New Generation Draws the
Line," he railed against our policies in East Timor and
Israel, and most importantly, our intervention in
Kosovo. What brought the U.S. to the battered region of
Yugoslavia, Chomsky wrote, was not a humanitarian drive
to stop Slobodan Milosevic from ethnically cleansing
yet another Muslim population, but in fact the
interests of our foreign policy elite. His critics
argue that this is typical; the Chomsky position
reflexively brands American foreign intervention as
self-interested or imperialistic, regardless of what
else might be at stake. But Chomsky's remarks after
Sept. 11 struck many as beyond the pale, even those
accustomed to his relentless style of dissent.

Chomsky's latest book, "9-11," is a collection of
interviews about the "war on terrorism" -- a
characterization of the current conflict he rejects.
The legendary 73-year-old linguist and political
essayist spoke to Salon last week from his office at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has
taught since 1955.

In your public comments after Sept. 11, you drew
comparisons to our bombing of the Sudan following bin
Laden's attacks on overseas American targets. Were you
implying that we brought this on ourselves?

Of course not. That's idiotic.

That wasn't your intention?

Nobody could possibly interpret it that way. [I said]
look, this is a horrendous atrocity but unfortunately
the toll is not unusual. And that's just a plain fact.
I mentioned the toll from one bombing, a minor footnote
to U.S. actions -- what was known to be a
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, providing half the
supplies of the country. That one bombing, according to
the estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and
Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands
of deaths.

I said, look, this is a horrible atrocity but outside
of Europe and North America, people understand very
well that it's just like a lot of history.

I'm kind of simple-minded. I believe in elementary
moral truisms -- namely, if something is a crime when
it's committed against us, it's a crime when we commit
it against others. If there is a simpler moral truism
than that, I'd like to hear it. I think it makes sense
to remind people of it.

Were you surprised by how people commonly interpreted
your statement?

No, not at all. I expect the intellectual classes to
behave exactly like that. That's their historical role
-- to support state violence and defame people who try
to bring up moral truisms.

You don't think that your statements downplayed what
happened on Sept. 11?

By saying that this was a horrendous atrocity committed
with wickedness and awesome cruelty, but we should
understand that the toll is regrettably not unusual?
What's unusual is the direction in which the guns were
pointing. I think we should be honest enough to
understand that.

You've said repeatedly that the United States is a
leading terrorist state. What is your definition of
terrorism?

My definition of terrorism is taken from the U.S. Code,
which seems to me quite adequate. It comes down to the
statement that terrorism is the calculated threat or
use of violence with the aim of intimidating and
provoking fear and damage in order to achieve
political, religious, ideological and other goals,
typically directed against civilian populations.

Do you distinguish between different kinds of
terrorism, and if so, how?

There are different kinds. The U.S., of course, did
declare a war on terrorism 20 years ago. The Reagan
administration came into office announcing that the war
on terrorism would be the core of U.S. foreign policy.
To quote Reagan and George Schultz, terrorism was
condemned as a war carried out by depraved opponents of
civilization itself, a return to barbarism in our time,
an evil scourge. They were concerned primarily with
what they called state-sponsored international
terrorism. So the Oklahoma City bombing was terrorism
but not state-supported international terrorism.

I take terrorism to be just how they define it. By that
standard, it's uncontroversial that the United States
is a leading terrorist state. In fact, it's the only
state that was condemned for international terrorism by
the highest bodies: the International Court of Justice
in 1986 [for backing Contra forces against Nicaragua]
and the supporting resolution of the Security Council
which followed shortly after that. The United States
vetoed it.

How do you distinguish between what you consider U.S.
terrorism and al-Qaida's terrorism on Sept. 11?

One is state terrorism and the other is private
terrorism.

How do you think both cases should be addressed?

Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in
exactly the right way. It followed international law
and treaty obligations. It collected evidence, brought
the evidence to the highest existing tribunal, the
International Court of Justice, and received a verdict
-- which of course the U.S. dismissed with contempt.
The court called upon the United States to terminate
the crime and pay substantial reparations. The U.S.
responded by immediately escalating the war; new
funding was provided. In fact, the U.S. official orders
shifted to more extreme terrorism. The Contra forces
were encouraged to attack "soft targets," as they were
called, or undefended civilian targets, and avoid
combat with the Nicaraguan army.

It continued until 1990. Nicaragua followed all the
right procedures, but of course, couldn't get anywhere
because the U.S. simply did not adhere to it. In that
case, there was no need to carry out a police
investigation. The facts were clear.

And al-Qaida?

In the case of something like al-Qaida terrorism -- I
presume like everyone else that al-Qaida was
responsible for Sept. 11, or some network very much
like it -- the right approach has been laid out by
others. For example, in the current issue of Foreign
Affairs, there's an article by the preeminent Anglo-
American military historian, Michael Howard, a very
conservative figure, who's very supportive of U.S.
policy and British policy.

I don't agree with a lot of what Howard says about
history, but his recommendation seems to make sense. He
says that the right way to deal with criminal
atrocities like the al-Qaida bombings is careful police
work; a criminal investigation carried out by
international authorities; the use of internationally
sanctioned means, which could include force, to
apprehend the criminals; bring the criminals to
justice; ensure that they have fair trials and
international tribunals. That sounds to me like sound
judgement. It's also been proposed by the Vatican and
innumerable others. So it's not only my opinion.

Do you think that American force is justified in the
case of self-defense?

Sure, anybody is entitled to self-defense. That's
Article 51 of the U.N. charter. However, it's very hard
to find such cases. Nicaragua, for example, was
entitled to the use of violence in self-defense. They
didn't follow that but they would have been entitled to
because they were certainly under attack.

Nicaragua's not the only case. All through Latin
America, there's sharp condemnation of the criminal
atrocities of Sept. 11. But it's qualified by the
observation that although these are horrible
atrocities, they are not unfamiliar. The Jesuit
University in Managua's research journal, Envio, says
that yes, [Sept. 11] could be called Armageddon but
we're familiar with our own Armageddon. They describe
the assault on Nicaragua, which was no small thing.
Tens of thousands of people were killed and the country
was practically destroyed during the Contra war.

So you don't think our war in Afghanistan is an example
of self-defense?

Is the United States under an armed attack?

I would think so.

Article 51 [of the U.N. charter] is very explicit and I
believe it's correct. It says force can be used in
self-defense against armed attack. Armed attack has a
definition in international law. It means sudden,
overwhelming, instantaneous ongoing attack. Nobody
believes the U.S. is under armed attack.

[Note: After the attacks, NATO allies invoked Article 5
of the North Atlantic Treaty which states, "An armed
attack against one or more of them in Europe or North
America shall be considered an attack against them
all."]

If the United States wanted to appeal to Article 51, it
could. The United States could easily have obtained
Security Council authorization for its use of force in
Afghanistan but purposely chose not to. It would have
gained authorization [and] Britain would go along
reflexively, France would raise no objections, Russia
would be enthusiastically in favor of it because Russia
is eager to gain U.S. support for its own massive
atrocities in Chechnya. China would have gone along for
similar reasons -- support for its own atrocities in
Western China. So there would have been no veto. But
the U.S. preferred not to have authorization, just as
the U.S. preferred not to ask for extradition.

What would motivate the U.S. to do this?

My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to
establish the principle that it has to defer to some
higher authority before carrying out the use of
violence.

It's a very natural position on the part of a powerful
state; in fact, I think it's probably close to
universal. If a state is powerful enough, it wants to
establish the principle that it can act without
authorization. In fact, that's official U.S. policy,
announced very clearly by Clinton and Madeleine
Albright: The U.S. will act multilaterally when
possible, unilaterally when deemed necessary.

I don't suggest that the United States is different
from any other country in this respect. Andorra would
do it too, if they could get away with it. But unless
you're a powerful state, you can't get away with it.

Why do you think that the attack on Sept. 11 was not an
armed attack on our country?

First of all, the United States itself does not claim
it was an armed attack. It claims it was an act of
terrorism, which is not an armed attack. An armed
attack is an act of war. So nobody claims that it was
an armed attack. But post-Sept. 11 there is no armed
attack. The only thing coming close was the anthrax
scare but that's apparently domestic.

You have to currently be under attack and you don't
think we are?

Yes, armed attack is ongoing, overwhelming attack. But
my opinion doesn't really matter. If the U.S. believed
it was under armed attack, it could go to the Security
Council under that principle. The U.S. doesn't want to.
The fact of the matter is it's not under armed attack
and nobody claims it is.

Is there anything about the Islamic threat -- we've
heard so much about their hatred of the West -- that
requires our intervention and use of force?

I tend to agree with radical rags like the Wall Street
Journal on this. Right after the Sept. 11 bombing, to
its credit, the Journal was the first and almost the
only newspaper -- the Christian Science Monitor did it
too -- to have a look at what opinion was really like
in the Islamic world. The Journal turned to the people
it's concerned with: wealthy Muslims. They had an
article -- I think it was called "Moneyed Muslims" --
that evaluated the attitudes of very pro-Western, pro-
American elements in the Islamic world: bankers,
international lawyers, people who worked for
multinational corporations. [The article] asked them
what they thought of the United States.

They expressed their attitude ... they're very strongly
in favor of major U.S. policies -- in fact they're part
of them. But they were opposed to the United States
because of its systematic opposition to democracy in
the Islamic world, its undermining of democratic
elements, its support for oppressive, corrupt and
brutal regimes. They're strongly opposed to its policy
of severely harming the civilian population of Iraq
while strengthening Saddam Hussein. And they remember,
even if we choose not to, that the United States
supported him through the worst atrocities. Of course,
they oppose the decisive U.S. support for what has been
a harsh and brutal military occupation for 35 years in
the Palestinian territories. They oppose all those
policies and that's very widespread, not only in the
Islamic world but in much of the Third World.

Take Latin America. There were international Gallup
polls taken after Sept. 11. The question was: Should
military force be used when everyone understands that
that military force is going to severely harm
civilians? Support was not very high, even in Europe.
But in Latin America it was particularly low. The
latest figures I've seen come from Envio, the research
journal of the Jesuit University in Managua. According
to them, figures ranged from a high of 11 percent in
Venezuela and Colombia to a low of 2 percent in Mexico.
Well, Latin America has experience with U.S. power.

But you don't think that the threat from the extremists
in the Islamic world justifies our use of force?

The threat is terrible. In fact, the people who the
Wall Street Journal was interviewing hate these guys.
They're their main enemies. People like Osama bin Laden
are aiming at them.

I want to be clear: Are you saying that because we're
guilty of abuses against the Islamic world and
elsewhere, the use of U.S. force to disable these
violent extremists is not justified?

I thought Michael Howard's proposal was quite
reasonable and that could very well have involved the
use of force. If you have criminal atrocities, it is
legitimate to use force to apprehend those who are
guilty and give them a fair trial. Incidentally, notice
that nobody, including you and me, believes that that
principle should apply to us. So we're all hopelessly
immoral, including me. None of us believes that that
principle should have been applied to the people who
were condemned by the world court.

You endorse a criminal pursuit of bin Laden and his
cohorts -- but why don't you don't believe that the war
in Afghanistan is justified in the wake of Sept. 11?

The war in Afghanistan targets Afghan civilians, and
openly. The British defense minister put it very
clearly in a front-page article in the New York Times.
He said we are going to attack the Afghans until they
finally realize that they better overthrow their
government. That's a virtual definition of
international terrorism.

Can you give an example of a situation where military
force is justified?

Force was justified when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and
Germany declared war against us. If you try to think of
the last 50 years, have there been military
interventions which really did bring massive atrocities
to an end? There are actually two cases, both in the
1970s. In 1971, India invaded what was then East
Pakistan and put an end to horrendous atrocities. In
1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in self-defense and
drove out the Khmer Rouge and terminated their
atrocities. Why aren't those called humanitarian
interventions? Why isn't the 1970s called the decade of
humanitarian intervention when there really were two
cases that ended massive atrocities?

There's a simple reason for that: The interventions
were carried out by the wrong parties -- not the United
States. And secondly, the U.S. strenuously opposed both
of the interventions and punished those who carried
them out. If we're honest, we would say yes, there were
two humanitarian interventions in the last 50 years.

So you do think that violence can bring peace?

Yes, the Second World War brought peace. I was a child,
but I did support the war at the time, and in
retrospect, still do.

Do you not think that we're under the same sort of
threat now?

We, under a threat? No, nothing remotely like it. We're
under the threat of a criminal conspiracy which ought
to be dealt with like a criminal conspiracy, pretty
much the way Michael Howard said. We're probably under
a bio-terror threat. Whatever the anthrax story was, I
don't take it lightly and I think that's a serious
threat.

What can or should be done about someone like Saddam
Hussein, someone who has access to weapons of mass
destruction?

Not only weapons of mass destruction but here it's
exactly the way Clinton, Bush, Blair and everyone else
says. He not only is a monster but his is the only
existing country that used weapons of mass destruction,
namely chemical warfare, against its own population.
All that's missing in that description is three words:
with our support.

Does that mean we should not go after him now?

Wait a minute. That's not a small point. He carried out
a huge a massacre of his own population with our
support. The U.S. continued, as did Britain, to support
him right through the worst atrocities, turning against
him when he disobeyed orders. That doesn't make him
less of a monster. But we should tell the truth. We
should not conceal those three words which everyone
else in the world knows.

What should we say?

We should say, "Yeah, we supported him in his worst
atrocities; now we don't like him anymore and what
should we do about him?" And, yeah, that's a problem.

My own feeling, to tell you the truth, is that there
was a great opportunity to get rid of Saddam Hussein in
March 1991. There was a massive Shiite uprising in the
south led by rebelling Iraqi generals. The U.S. had
total command of the region at the time. [The Iraqi
generals] didn't ask for U.S. support but they asked
for access to captured Iraqi equipment and they asked
the United States to prevent Saddam from using his air
force to attack the rebels. The U.S. refused. It
allowed Saddam Hussein to use military helicopters and
other forces to crush the rebellion.

You can read it in the New York Times. It was more
important to maintain stability -- that was the word
that was used -- or as the diplomatic correspondent of
the New York Times put it, the best of all worlds for
the United States would have been for an iron-fisted
military junta to seize power and rule in Iraq the way
Saddam Hussein did. But since we couldn't get that,
we'd have to accept him. That was the main opportunity
of getting rid of him. Since then it hasn't been so
simple. The forces of resistance were crushed with our
help, after the war.

Since then, there's a question of whether the Iraqi
Democratic opposition forces could mount some means of
overthrowing this monster. That's a tricky business.
The worst way of doing it is to undermine opposition to
him. That's exactly what the sanctions do. Everyone who
observed the sanctions has concluded -- including the
humanitarian administrators, Dennis Halliday and Hans
von Sponeck, who know more about it than anyone else --
that the sanctions have severely harmed the civilian
population and strengthened Saddam Hussein. People
under severe sanctions and trying to survive are not
going to carry out any action against an armed military
force.

So how would you feel about it if we were to continue
the war on terrorism there?

There's no war on terrorism. That's a term of
propaganda. There cannot be a war on terrorism led by
the one state in the world that has been condemned for
international terrorism and supported by major
terrorist states like Russia and China. We can call it
something but we can't call it a war on terrorism.

But do you think that we should move against Iraq now?

No, I agree with virtually the whole world, including
our closest allies, that a military attack on Iraq
would be a terrible mistake.

Why?

Same reason that everyone in the world, including
England, is telling the U.S. government not to do it.
They apparently have no evidence whatsoever that would
tie Iraq to these atrocities, so an attack on Iraq
would be for some other reason that existed before. If
those reasons were there before, why didn't the U.S. do
it then? For one thing, they're not going to do it
because they don't want to get rid of Saddam Hussein;
given the likely alternatives, they don't want to break
the country up.

What real difference do you think it would make if we
were more honest about some of the things that we've
done? It seems like one of your main complaints is
against American rhetoric and propaganda.

If we were honest, then we could at least evaluate what
we do sanely. If we're dishonest, we know that whatever
we do, only by the merest accident will it be
justified. The first elementary step is honesty. After
that you can go on and consider complicated issues on
their merits.

Do you think that U.S. foreign policy always narrowly
serves our national self-interest?

No, I don't think it's national self-interest. That's a
term of propaganda. It implies that it's in the
interest of the nation. No state acts in the interest
of the nation. They usually act in the interest of
powerful internal groups that dominate policy. Again,
that's a historical truism. I don't think Nazi Germany
was acting in the interest of the German people. In the
case of the United States, we know who the planners are
and where they come from, and yes, I think they usually
act in their own interest. It's not very surprising.

Do you think foreign interventions might ever be driven
by a mixed bag of motivations?

Sure, every atrocity in history, including Hitler's
invasions and the Japanese conquests, was a mixed bag.
Take Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, look at the
rhetoric. They were going to Christianize and uplift
the natives and end slavery and bring liberty and
freedom to the benighted Africans. Certainly the U.S.
State Department believed it; they approved of it. It's
always a mixed bag.

Is it your position that we're driven by imperial
designs?

No more than any other country. It happens that the
U.S. is overwhelmingly the most powerful country in the
world and has been for 50 years, so of course its reach
is far greater. Luxembourg might be driven by the same
goals but can't do much about it.

What would our imperial interest have been in Kosovo,
then?

I take the official reasons very seriously. I tend to
be rather literal; I assume people are telling the
truth. The official reasons were three that were
repeated over and over again by Defense Secretary
[William] Cohen in his congressional testimony a year
after the war. The first was to prevent ethnic
cleansing. The second was to ensure the stability of
the region. And the third was to establish credibility.
The first we can dismiss because it's agreed on all
sides that ethnic cleansing took place after the
bombing began.

But Milosevic had already carried out ethnic cleansing
in other regions of Yugoslavia before Kosovo and he was
pressuring the Albanian population in Kosovo, so the
threat -- and intention -- was clearly there.

Well, yes, but there's a very detailed record of this.
The State Department has presented extensive
documentation, as has NATO, the Kosovo observers and so
on. There were plenty of atrocities going on. In fact,
the British government, which was the most hawkish
element of the coalition as late as January 1999,
attributed most of the atrocities to the Kosovo
Liberation Army. Look, it was a very ugly place --
there may have been 2,000 people killed on all sides in
the preceding years and a lot of people displaced. But
that was not the ethnic cleansing anyone's talking
about. The United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees had no registered refugees at the time the
bombing was started.

The massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities began a
little bit after the withdrawal of the monitors on
March 22. But it really began after the bombing on
March 24. That's just not contested. We can contest
whether it was a consequence of the bombing. Gen.
Wesley K. Clark, the commander, announced that a
predictable consequence of the bombing would be ethnic
cleansing. Maybe he's right, maybe he's not. So we know
that the bombing was not undertaken to prevent the
ethnic cleansing that followed it. Clark himself, three
weeks after the war, was asked over British television
whether the reason for the bombing was ethnic
cleansing. He said of course not. Ethnic cleansing was
never a factor.

So we're left with the next two reasons: ensuring
stability and maintaining credibility. I think those
are probably the reasons. Maintaining stability has a
very special meaning. It doesn't mean that the area is
quiet. Stability means under Western control. What does
maintaining credibility mean? It means making sure that
people are afraid of you and what you're going to do.

What would the alternative have been? If the West had
not intervened, Milosevic could have carried on with
his atrocities unmolested.

In Kosovo, right before the bombing, there were two
positions on the table. One was the NATO position, the
other was the Serbian government position. They both
called for an international presence in Kosovo but they
differed on what that should be. The NATO position was
that it had to be a NATO-led international presence
with a free run of all of Serbia. The Serbian position
was vague. If you take a look at the peace treaty, it's
a compromise between the two positions. Suppose they
had pursued the possibility of the compromised solution
which, in fact, was reached on paper at least. Could
that have worked? Well, we don't know because it was
refused.

I'm not a pacifist. I think use of force is sometimes
legitimate. However, if someone is calling for the use
of force, they have a heavy burden of proof to meet.
The burden of proof is always on those who call for the
use of violence, in particular extreme violence. That's
a moral truism. The question is, was that burden met?
Try to find some argument which meets that burden of
proof. Don't take my word for it, check the facts.
You'll find that the literature on this almost entirely
overlooks the crucial evidence which is the extensive,
detailed evidence from Western sources on what was
happening up to the bombing. The only book I know that
covers this is my own.

Second, take a look at the arguments that are given to
justify the bombing. Either they claim that ethnic
cleansing and atrocities were going on before the
bombing -- which we know is false -- or they claim the
bombing was carried out because ethnic cleansing was
going to take place. Well, by that argument you could
justify anything.

Couldn't NATO have been basing its actions on what we'd
all seen Milosevic was capable of in Bosnia and
Croatia?

They could have. But by that argument, if you really
believe that, then they should have been bombing
Jakarta, Washington and London. Which of course nobody
believes.

At that very same time, Indonesia was carrying out much
worse atrocities in East Timor. Furthermore, the
Indonesian generals were announcing very loudly and
clearly that unless the planned referendum went their
way, they would just wipe the place out. Britain and
the United States were still supporting the
Indonesians, who had wiped out a third of the
population. So according to the argument you're
proposing, you're saying that the United States should
have bombed themselves and Indonesia. We don't believe
that.

Let me repeat a moral truism. If there is a principle
that we apply to others, we must insist that the
principle apply to us. If there is a principle that
justified the bombing in Serbia, formulate the
principle and ask -- does it apply to us?

But as the world's largest superpower, we are called
on, sometimes by countries that have criticized us, to
intervene in conflicts. What role is the world's
superpower supposed to play?

The first, simplest role it should play is to stop
participating in atrocities. In 1999, for example, one
role the U.S. could have played is to stop
participating in the atrocities in East Timor. Britain
could have played the same role. That would have made a
big difference. In fact, when the U.S. finally did
inform Indonesia that the game was over on Sept. 11,
after the worst had happened, they instantly withdrew.
The power was always there.

Take another case. There was much talk about how NATO
couldn't tolerate atrocities like those in Kosovo right
near its borders. A small fact was overlooked: NATO was
not only tolerating but in fact supporting much worse
atrocities right within its borders -- namely, Turkish
atrocities against the Kurds inside Turkey. Eighty
percent of the arms were coming from the United States.
They peaked in the late 1990s and led to tens of
thousands of people killed and 3,500 towns and villages
destroyed. There were 2 to 3 million refugees. One way
the greatest superpower could act is by terminating its
massive and critical support for these atrocities.

Some of your positions, on Kosovo for example, have led
people even on the left to suggest that you think no
matter what the U.S. does it's unacceptable simply
because the U.S. is doing it.

If people believe that, that's because they insist on
pure propaganda and refuse to look at the facts. You
can easily see whether in fact I said that. I didn't.
And I don't believe it. I can't help what intellectuals
decide to believe. If they want to fabricate propaganda
images and believe what they say or they hear in
gossip, that's their metier.

As you know, people like you and Susan Sontag have
gotten a lot of outraged reactions to some of the
things you've said after Sept. 11 -- again, even from
some on the left. What do you think about the future of
the American left?

It's certainly much better than it's been in the past.
The outraged reactions are coming mostly from
intellectuals, liberal intellectuals. But that's
standard. It was much worse in the '60s. In fact,
liberal intellectuals typically tend to support the use
of state violence. Who initiated the Vietnam War?
Liberal intellectuals, that was Kennedy's war. Back in
those days, in the early '60s, I remember very well
attempts to raise even the most mild criticism of the
war at that time. You couldn't get four people in an
auditorium to listen to you. In Boston, which is a
pretty liberal city, we couldn't have a public
demonstration against the war until about 1966 without
it being physically attacked by people and protected by
police. It's incomparably better.

About the writer Suzy Hansen is an assistant editor at
Salon.