by Noam Chomsky

It's 40 years since we issued the “Call to resist illegitimate authority.” I thought at the time that it was quite an appropriate and powerful document, despite some reservations that I had about the title of the document. When we talk about “resisting illegitimate authority,” it presupposes that illegitimate authority is somehow an oddity, that the norm is legitimate authority. We should really look at it the other way around. Authority is illegitimate, it has to prove itself, and it very rarely can. The burden of proof is on authority, not on opposing authority, and that's true in every aspect of life.

The title of “the Call” made sense at the time because the idea of resisting authority was pretty much on the margin. In 1967, there wasn't much of a sense of challenging institutions, but rather mostly kind of a cultural challenge—to do things differently, or to be a hippie or something like that. In contrast, the idea of actually challenging existing institutions and their behavior was pretty remote from consciousness.

Nowadays things look pretty ugly in many ways, but it looked a lot worse in 1967. By then, the effectiveness of the civil rights movement as a mass popular movement ran aground when it addressed questions of class. When the focus shifted from racist sheriffs in Alabama to hit privilege and power, it quickly collapsed. It’s worth recalling that Martin Luther King was assassinated when he was planning to lead a Poor People's Movement, something that was not acceptable.
At the time we issued the “Call to resist,” the civil rights movement had pretty well disappeared. There was barely the beginning of a feminist movement. There was no environmental movement, and no one talked about issues like gay rights. Repression at that time was far more severe than it is today. There's nothing now like COINTELPRO, for example. A major government operation that ran through four administrations, mainly Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, COINTELPRO was carried out by the national political police, the FBI, targeting just about everybody: Puerto Rican nationalists, the Socialist Workers Party, the incipient women's movement, all the black movements, the entire New Left.

One of the unfortunately unforgettable early moments in RESIST was when a couple of board members flew to Chicago in 1969 just to be present at the funeral for Fred Hampton. He was the black organizer who was assassinated in a literal Gestapo-style assassination set up by the FBI and implemented by the Chicago police. But the crime elicited far too little concern. Repression was severe, there was a war going on, and in effect RESIST itself was focused primarily on resistance to the war.

The war itself had already been going on for years by then. There was so little protest that people don't even remember when it started as an actual war, rather than repression, subversion and the like. That was 1962, when John F. Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, initiated chemical warfare programs to destroy crops, livestock and ground cover. That's a major war. By 1965 the war had in fact expanded. The U.S. was starting to bomb North Vietnam. But even then protest was very limited.
The first major public protest against the war was October 1965, the first international day of protest. We did have a demonstration at the Boston Common, a rally at the Boston Common, or rather intended to. It was just broken up violently by students, among others. You couldn't hear a word any speaker was saying. If you listened to the radio that day or read the Boston Globe the next day it was full of bitter denunciations of people who dared to issue embarrassingly mild protests against the war. The protests then were mostly against the bombing of North Vietnam which was bad enough, but a side show. The main attack was against South Vietnam, it always was.

The circumstances are quite different now, and in many ways much improved. Repression today may be wiretapping, but it's not political assassination and mass efforts by the political police to destroy any popular movement. There's a war, a terrible war, but it's not a half a million troops and 60,000 or 70,000 Korean and Thai mercenaries wiping out South Vietnam and then going on later to destroy most of the rest of Indo-China.

Unlike Vietnam, the Iraq War is the first one in the history of western imperialism as far as I can recall where there was mass popular protest before the war was even officially launched. And it continues, not at a level that we’d all like to see, but way beyond the level of any comparable stage of the Vietnam War.

The situation now is one in which we can think seriously about resisting authority across a broad spectrum. When you take a look at the country now, I suspect that if you counted noses, there's much more activism than there was in the '60s. It's separated into atomized small groups, but it's there. And in fact we can see even in intensive studies of public opinion how deep it is. By now both political parties are way to the right of the population on a host of major issues, crucial issues, which means that there is a basis for organizing resistance to authority, the authority that shouldn't exist. Let me give you two examples.

One of the main international issues we face is a possible U.S. invasion of Iran. The leading British military historian, Corelli Barnett, wrote that if it happens we'll be in World War III. I don't know about that, but certainly it will be extremely ugly and horrible. What do the American people think about it? Intensive polls of Iranians and Americans by WorldPublicOpinion.org show that they basically agree on a reasonable settlement of Iran/U.S. conflicts. The vast majority—about 75 percent—agree that Iran has a right to nuclear power as a signer of the nonproliferation treaty, but should not have nuclear weapons.

By the same overwhelming majority, Americans and Iranians agree that the whole region should be a nuclear weapons-free zone, including Iran, Israel, and any American forces deployed there. An even higher percent of Americans (over 80 percent) believe that the United States should live up to its legal requirement under the nonproliferation treaty and move to eliminate all of its nuclear weapons. About the same percentage think there should be no threats against Iran, but rather the pursuit of normal relations.

Well, that's the public opinion, but every one of the viable presidential candidates says we should continue with the threats of war against Iran. If anybody cares, these threats are themselves major violations of international law given that the U.N Charter bars this kind of threat or use of force. Politicians and the media discuss threats, while the majority of the people supports something else entirely. The population is there, ready to be organized. We have to find ways to reach those people on the issues that matter to them and help them escape from the clutches of propaganda systems that can really drive people to vicious atrocities. We know that very well.

The same is true of confronting the system of corporate power at home, something that was almost unimaginable in the 1960s but is taking place now in many ways.

That brings me to my second example. The main concern of people at home for a long time has been the health care system, which is a total catastrophe. A majority of the population for decades has been in favor of national health care, perhaps something like extending Medicare to the whole population, which would be far more efficient.

Despite popular support, such a notion has never even arisen in a political campaign. As recently as 2004, if it was even mentioned, health care reform was called “politically impossible” or “lacking political support”—meaning it doesn’t matter how much the population wants it because the insurance companies are against it, and the pharmaceutical companies are against it. That's not true anymore. Now there's enough popular pressure so that candidates have to at least say something about it, maybe not the right things, but something.

There is again a population ready to be organized, ready to understand that the issue is not just a rotten health care system. Rather, it's corporate control of a rotten health care system which makes it that way, and that takes us right to the heart of authority. Unlike the time of RESIST’s founding, today the notion of resisting authority is not an unimaginable notion; in fact, it's a common notion. Because resisting authority makes sense. Authority is not legitimate unless it proves itself, which it rarely can do.

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Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an ardent critic of US imperialism and a founding member of RESIST. This article is excerpted from his comments at RESIST’s 40th anniversary celebration.