Kreisler: "You believe that there are two kinds of intellectuals -- one, the kinds who serve power and are rewarded, and the others are those who stand outside, who basically call a spade a spade."
Chomsky: "Yes, we all agree with that when we're talking about enemies. So when we're talking about the Soviet Union, we all agree that there was a difference between the commissars and the dissidents. The commissars were the guys inside who were propagating state propaganda, and the dissidents were a very small group on the fringe, who were trying to call a spade a spade. And we honor the dissidents and we condemn the commissars.
Because they were doing it among our adversaries.
Yes. When we turn around at home, it's the opposite: we honor the commissars and we condemn the dissidents. And furthermore, this goes right through history. Go back to classical Greece and the Bible. Who drank the hemlock in classical Greece? Was it a commissar or a dissident? When we you go to, say, the Bible, you read the biblical record, there are people called prophets. Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned. Yeah, that's the way it's been throughout history. And, understandably. Power does not like to be undermined."
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