[noam chomsky] institutional violence

Institutional violence undated excerpts from the transcript of an interview from "Democracy is Coming to the USA" -- a film by Walter Miale Appears as "Sparrow talks with Noam Chomsky" on the Green World Center website Noam Chomsky interviewed by "Sparrow McLeod" QUESTION: Um, so I'm supposed to introduce you tonight, and uh, what exactly are you going to be talking about? CHOMSKY: Well, exactly I never know but, in general, I'll be talking about institutional violence. QUESTION: Institutional violence, what is that? CHOMSKY: Well, violence comes in many varieties. Sometimes it's carried out randomly by individuals; sometimes it's domestic abuse; sometimes it's homicide, robbery, threats, and so on. But then of course we live in a world of complex institutions, and often they carry out organized violence, most extreme example is war but there's a whole range-- QUESTION: So it's basically war? CHOMSKY: War is the extreme case, but imprisonment can be another kind, or repression, or I think you can extend the notion to racist and sexist principles.... If institutions act in a way as to make people suffer or be tortured or die or starve or something well, that's just a larger scale form of violence than when individuals do things like that, and in fact a huge proportion, overwhelming proportion of the violence in our world and lives is institutional -- naturally, because they're a lot more powerful. QUESTION: Well when I think of violence, I have an image of what I see all the time on TV -- crime and terrorism and so on. But, uh, are you saying violence is really something else? CHOMSKY: Oh, no, that's real, but we also see plenty of other violence on TV and we just don't call it violence.... So for example when you saw on TV US missiles hitting a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan which produces a substantial part of the country's pharmacueticals and fertilizers, this wasn't called violence, but was called self-defense. But suppose that somone, a terrorist, let's say, a Sudanese terrorist, had bombed US pharmacuetical and fertilizer plants destroying say maybe half of our pharmacueticals and fertilizers. You would have seen that on TV too, and that would have been called violence. Institutions are powerful enough not only to carry out massive violence but also to set up the ideological framework which defines it as not violence but as defense against violence. That's a subtantial part of the power of institutions, their ideological control. And that was a

[noam chomsky] institutional violence

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