Some examples of the essential Chomsky:
TRANSCRIPTION OF TV INTERVIEW OF NOAM
CHOMSKY BY JOHN PILGER(excerpt)
25 Nov 1992
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PILGER: As a as a libertarian socialist, though, what do you make of the received
wisdom | today, that socialism is dead? It’s had it?
CHOMSKY: Well, Let’s take the various parts of the world. What was called ‘socialism’
in eastern Europe was killed by late 1917 or early 1918. Every socialist tendency that had
developed in the pre-Bolshevik period was immediately extirpated, including Soviets,
workers factory councils, any popular organization was wiped out. So since then there
hasn’t been a trace of socialism in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet system. In the west there
have been, you know there’s kind of a slow, there’s a move towards a kind of a social
democratic, state capitalism of some kind or other, in various places. The basic ideas of
socialism are in the future. Socialism is based, traditional socialism is simply based on, the
application of enlightenment ideals to an industrial society, and it means that er workers
will control production, communities will control communities, and so on, that’s socialism,
if it means anything.
PILGER: OK. So your brand of libertarian socialism. Has that existed anywhere?
CHOMSKY: Well, you know, it’s a bit like asking if democracy has existed anywhere.
Bits and pieces of it, yes. I mean, if you look around the world, there are bits and pieces of
democracy. In the United States there are elements of democracy - very limited elements -
but real ones, so it’s an improvement over the 17th century, let’s say. The the American
Revolution was equally flawed in many ways. In fact, if a third world country today were
to promulgate the US Constitution, we would regard it as a reversion to Nazism. That
constitution identifies a group of people as three-fifths human, for example. But
nevertheless, in the context of the time, it was a tremendous advance. Er and the struggle
for freedom is unending. Er You cross one bridge, you find other barriers. So there are
bits and pieces of democracy, there are bits and pieces of popular control, there are new
forms of authority and domination that we didn’t notice before.
Human Rights in the New World Order
Noam Chomsky
Speech delivered at Liberty's Human Rights Convention, Central Hall,
Westminster, 16th June 1995(excerpt)
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The methods differ from place to place and time to time, as contingencies change. They
are different where there are very few impediments, so the operative goals and values are
revealed with particular clarity, places like Brazil and Guatemala, Indonesia, Haiti,
Colombia and so on through quite an impressive record of atrocities, ranging from torture
and extermination to mass starvation and disease. At home the methods have necessarily
been somewhat different. There is plenty of violence, labor history in the US has no
parallel in the industrial world. That evoked constant astonishment, even in the right wing
British press, right through the early part of this century. In the 1930s, American workers
finally won the standard labor rights that had been achieved elsewhere decades earlier.
That caused complete horror in the business community. They had assumed, as they do
now, that this cancer had been excised by Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare, another exercise
of Wilsonian idealism, and other methods which seemed to have suppressed the labor
movement completely and put the country under business control. Then they got out of
hand again in the ’30s and won labor rights.
The business world immediately launched a campaign to undermine what they called “the
rising political power of the masses”, which is “the greatest hazard facing industrialists”.
In fact, the post-war period has been marked by an enormous propaganda campaign to
undermine unions, to contain and to roll back labor rights and the whole array of human
rights that had been won in a century of often bitter struggle. The scale of this is really
remarkable, it is only just being discovered and it is important to discuss - I wish I had
time for it, quite interesting. All of this is accelerating dramatically now.
Well, the basic policy goal, since James Madison until today, is to undermine the more
democratic aspects of government. Right now that means to increase the power of the
executive, of the courts, the security apparatus and the whole system that funnels public
funds to advanced sectors of industry, basically the Pentagon, and also to transfer decision
making as far as possible out of government altogether and into the hands of private
tyrannies, which are unaccountable, unregulated, totalitarian in their internal structure,
international in scale. They were given the rights they now have early in this century. It is
not graven in stone. These are recent forms of totalitarianism, and they are crucially free
from the threat of popular participation that is kind of a lingering danger in parliamentary
systems.
The following is an excerpt from “What Uncle Sam Really Wants” by Noam
Chomsky.
scarletfire.com
The threat of a good example
No country is exempt from this treatment, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's
the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.
Take Laos in the 1960s, probably the poorest country in the world. Most of the
people who lived there didn't even know there was such a thing as Laos; they just
knew they had a little village and there was another little village nearby.
But as soon as a very low-level social revolution began to develop there,
Washington subjected Laos to a murderous "secret bombing," virtually wiping out
large settled areas in operations that, it was conceded, had nothing to do with the
war the US was waging in South Vietnam.
Grenada has a hundred thousand people who produce a litte nutmeg, and you
could hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a mild social
revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat.
From the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 till the collapse of the Communist
governments in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, it was possible to justify every
US attack as defense against the Soviet threat. So when the United States invaded
Grenada in 1983, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff explained that, in the
event of a Soviet attack on Western Europe, a hostile Grenada could interdict oil
supplies from the Caribbean to Western Europe and we wouldn't be able to defend
our beleagured allies. Now this sounds comical, but that kind of story helps
mobilize public support for aggression, terror and subversion.
The attack against Nicaragua was justified by the claim that if we don't stop
"them" there, they'll be pouring across the border at Harlingen, Texas - just two
days' drive away. (For educated people, there were more sophisticated variants,
just about as plausible.)
As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody
would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to
murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and
many billions of dollars.
There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous
is is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing
about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask,
"why not us?"
This was even true in Indochina, which is pretty big and has some significant
resources. Although Eisenhower and his advisers ranted a lot about the rice and tin
and rubber, the real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved independence
and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and if that worked, they'd try
it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would pursue an independent path, and by
then a significant area of the Grand Area would have been lost.
If you want a global system that's subordinated to the needs of US investors, you
can't let pieces of it wander off. It's striking how clearly this is stated in the
documentary record - even in the public record at times. Take Chile under Allende.
Chile is a fairly big place, with a lot of natural resources, but again, the United
States wasn't going to collapse if Chile became independent. Why were we so
concerned about it? According to Kissinger, Chile was a "virus" that would
"infect" the region with effects all the way to Italy.
Despite 40 years of CIA subversion, Italy still has a labor movement. Seeing a
social democratic government succeed in Chile would send the wrong message to
Italian voters. Suppose they get funny ideas about taking control of their own
country and revive the workers' movements the CIA undermined in the 1940s?
US planners from Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the late 1940s to the present
have warned that "one rotten apple can spoil the barrel." The danger is that the
"rot" - social and economic development - may spread.
This "rotten apple theory" is called the domino theory for public consumption. The
version used to frighten the public has Ho Chi Minh getting in a canoe and landing
in California, and so on. Maybe some US leaders believe this nonsense - it's
possible - but rational planners certainly don't. They understand that the real threat
is the "good example."
Sometimes the point is explained with great clarity. When the US was planning to
overthrow Guatemalan democracy in 1954, a State Department offical pointed out
that "Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and
El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social
program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the
upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations
of Central American neighbors where similar condition prevail."
In other words, what the US wants is "stability," meaning security for the "upper
classes and large foreign enterprises." If that can be achieved with formal
democratic devices, OK. If not, the "threat to stability" posed by a good example
has to be destroyed before the virus infects others.
That's why even the tiniest speck poses such a threat, and may have to be crushed. |
