An Interview with Noam Chomsky by Doug Richardson (April 6, 2017)

there are there are more seats on the sides over here so just just kind of move move in that direction okay we're going to get started I'll stand up for a minute okay okay we're going to get started please take your seat how wonderful to have Noam Chomsky back here with us if this will be our third interview between the two of us one of them a long time ago in 1974 and focused mostly on anarchism and and other current ills in society that that were then wide-ranging now we're visiting again with another wave of turbulence and and and problematic issues but there's a lot to be gained from discussing these as lot to begin to find hopeful ways forward paths through the ticket and so forth and that's what we'll be mostly discussing today for the three or four people out there who don't know Nam Chomsky I'm going to give an introduction in terms quote in terms of the power range novelty and influence of his thought Noam Chomsky is arguably arguably the most important intellectual alive today I'm delighted that he could be here to join us in Boston for a special session entitled a conversation with Noam Chomsky this session will be a conversational interview followed by an opportunity for our audience participation to Q&A period as most geographers know of Chomsky is written and lectured widely on linguistics philosophy intellectual history contemporary issues international affairs and u.s. foreign policy a small sampling of his numerous publications include the book that I was first introduced to him by American power and the new mandarins then a lot of linguistics works including Cartesian linguistics and a number of political books well over a hundred books I think for reasons of state the political economy of human rights and power and ideology language and the problems of knowledge profit over people new horizons in the study of language in mind understanding power and most recently the requiem for the American dream nomes work on the nature of human language and communication is profoundly true formed the field of linguistics and greatly influenced science and philosophy more very more broadly the so called chomskyan revolution generated intellectual reverberations across many disciplines including geography anthropology education psychology and genetics Noam Chomsky is one of the most frequently cited scholars of all time Noam also has been an impassioned critic of American foreign policy and a corporate and government power is now a classic book on the role of intellectuals in American society American power in the new mandarins greatly influenced the debate on the Vietnam War and continues to prompt exact examination of the complicity of intellectuals and implementing policies entrenched in in entrenched power to this day his arguments resonate strongly in the context of the rise of new authoritarian regimes at this time it's a wonderful honor and great pleasure to welcome Noam Chomsky okay I'd like to start start out on one topic other than Trump and because that we get on that topic which may never get off it for the rest of the interview so I'd first like to to learn from you know a little bit about what you think about the the role of human rights today you see human rights as being able to play a role as sort of a foundational framework for us as we move forward some form of grounding or the abuse of those areas then to to wide-reaching I pose this question in the context of one of the major themes of this particular meeting of geographers we have more than 9,000 geographers assembled here from around the world and that theme is in is mainstreaming human rights in in geography and the aaj our association this is grown out of about ten years of work that we've been doing with a number of groups from Amnesty International and many human rights organizations to the triple is the American Association for the Advancement of science one of the outgrowth of that has been a very interesting coalition that's come together called the Coalition for science and human rights and this has brought together over 40 scientific associations from chemistry to social sciences and we've agree at the AJ of have played a central role in the development of that coalition over the years so what I guess what do you see is potentially promising strategies for advancing human rights and should we be doing that or should we focus on something else well there is of course a gold standard on human rights the Universal Declaration 1948 theoretically states adhere to it and practice that's far from true the Universal Declaration ISM sure you know has three components of equal significance one is civil and political rights first one the second is social and economic rights the third is community and cultural rights the sand of the United States is pretty explicit in principle the United States supports the first component we can ask about practice but at least in principle it's advocated there are quite interesting questions about practice about say the history of what's called democracy promotion and so on could go into that if you're interested but at least in principle it's advocated the third component cultural community rights is simply ignored there's almost no discussion or comment on it the second social and economic rights is an interesting one and very much on the agenda constantly especially article 25 which calls for which declares that the right to health help the health care these jobs at reasonable employment and so on and so forth are all fundamental human rights the US has a position on that it was stated pretty blandly by Reagan Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State and Jean Kirkpatrick she described this component of the Declaration as a letter to Santa Claus that was reiterated and expanded by her followers Polidori on ski assistant secretary for Human Rights Mars Abram the US ambassador the UN Human Rights Commission in his case commenting on the right the right to development pretty much paraphrased article 25 the US alone refused to sign it Abram called it a provocation a dangerous provocation an idea that has no basis in law or practice debris on ski dismissed dismissed it as dismissed the myth that social and economic rights are fundamental human rights and we see it in practice they were not alone incidentally the Russian ambassador Wyszynski right at the outset dismissed this is sort of a pious joke so we're in good company in practice you can look at the records of the organ see you know the organization of the rich countries roughly 30 rich countries they have a detailed annual reports on the what they call social justice the extent to which members of the rich club provides suppose so to observe the conditions on social justice enunciated in the Universal Declaration the u.s. ranks way at the bottom along side of Mexico Turkey about twenty nine I think or so of the three some countries and we see that in many ways we're seeing it right now in debates in Washington we see it in the fact that the United States is practically alone in the developed world that it does not have some form of national health care except for the general public but that's not because people don't want it in fact it was a poll just a couple days ago which showed once again that given three options what's called single-payer here meaning universal health care the Republican proposal the Affordable Care Act other the Republican proposal was opposed by a huge majority the affordable care act was a moderate support but majority support was for public option universal health care that's been true for many years it's one of the very it's very interesting fact about u.s. public opinion the when the question is asked in a reasonable way you know a lot as is you know polls depend a lot on how the questions are formulated but if the poll if the questions are asked in a sort of a rational way then quite typically people prefer a universal health care sometimes with great enthusiasm so toward the end of the Reagan years for example about 70% of the population thought that there should be a constitutional guarantee of health care should be in the Constitution and about 40% of the population photo was already in the Constitution nobody knows what's in the Constitution except that it's a holy book with everything good and so must have universal health care and there have been results for like that for a long time it when it's it's not discussed very much in the press but when it is the commentary is interesting so for example when Carey was running for president the last debate was on social and economic policy if you look back at the times commentary it says but Kerry didn't bring up any notion like public health care national health care and the reason they said is interesting words they said it has two little political support which is correct it is not supported by those who determine policy the financial institutions the pharmaceutical institutions they don't support it so it doesn't have political support there is something called a population but their views are not political support and this of course bears on the first component of the Universal Declaration civets civil and political rights and about that there's quite a lot to say but I don't want to throw it on about it we're already we're already trending into trumpism but we let's back up just a little bit here as I mentioned one of the major themes of our meeting today is is is is human rights but not not only the current provision but but how they might be applied to to the day-to-day activities of of academics of people conducting research people trying to anticipate what the outcomes of their research would be and in how to how to manage that those kinds of tricky questions in terms of the practice of say geography the practice of philosophy of practice of many many types of science and of course with lots of new technologies coming up it's it's we run quickly into unintended consequences of technologies we run quickly into unforeseen consequences and of course there's the wide range of intended consequences which or those that should have been foreseen and this is somewhat close to to my own heart because isn't earlier in my career I developed the Dalton patent their first real-time interactive GPS and GIS systems geographic information systems which which at that time had broad-based environmental applications that they were developed for and now we see that that you know most were used now heavily in surveillance and they're used heavily in areas which essentially in modern warfare in fact most of our wars are fought now basically as one big large scale real-time interactive GPS GIS system and so these these questions are be deviling and they're also I think require us to engage them at various points and yeah once the genies out of the bottle what do you do well as I'm sure you're aware there is a group within the American Geographical Society the network of concern geographers which has been coming forward with petitions and proposals about exactly these issues specifically about the cooperation of geographers with the military GPS is an example GPS of course was developed within the military then offered other used for surveillance for bombing for all sorts of things geographers of course are very closely involved just like anthropologists with so what are sometimes called human terrain issues what does the military expect to do in particular areas and that raises hard questions which the group is raising and I think should be taken very seriously their petition lists a series of specific proposals I presume that you're taking account of them and taking them into consideration I certainly think you should be and for other professions and similar questions arise then a quite similar way for ants ecology and the anthropologists have taken some fairly strong positions about participating and not not participating in military actions and addressing indigenous tribal communities and others have very much the same concern there are some cases of human rights which we are all critically concerned with they should be on the top of the agenda for everyone that's the question of human survival which is at stake now in a way that it has not been for the roughly 200,000 years in which almost a pians have been around as again I'm not telling you anything you don't know but we're now well into two new errors in human history the nuclear age again in 1945 the Anthropocene which the American geological the world geological Association now decided to date at roughly the same time after the second mediate last of the Second World War where human impact on the environment that created essentially in geological epoch and these two threats are existential imminent and furthermore we're racing towards magnifying them which is very as I said many times I find it really hard to find words to capture the fact that with eyes open knowing what the consequences are the United States is now separating itself from the world and racing towards the precipice of environmental catastrophe the other great issue nuclear war tensions are building up at the Russian border that's been increasing since 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed NATO began to expand senior statesman like George Kennan and others warned right away that NATO expansion is a disaster in the making for pretty obvious reasons you can simply ask how the United States would be reacting if the Warsaw Pact word had taken over Latin America and was now approaching the Mexican border and then Canadian border of course that's absolutely inconceivable we would have had a terminal nuclear war long before this state arise arose but it's not happening on the Russian border serious provocations on both sides there is the best single monitor of the prospect for human survival in my view was the Doomsday Clock of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists serious scientists political analysts gather every year and try to do an analysis of how far we are from midnight midnight this terminal the Doomsday Clock was established in 1947 at that point the hand was seven minutes to midnight it's moved up and back over the years the closest it came to midnight was 1953 when Russia and the United States exploded thermonuclear weapons it's an changed now a couple of weeks into the Trump term the clock has been moved another half minute towards midnight two and a half minutes to midnight the closest it's been since 1953 and now as distinct from then two major issues are raised by those who set clock the constant and growing nuclear war and the ominous a threat of environmental catastrophe both issues of particular concern to geographers but of great concern to every human being anyone who cares about whether organized human life will survive on the planet thanks I'm have some of the issues that we talked about just now related to engagement with the military and so forth is that an issue that's come up with linguists as well but you know as you probably where a great deal of linguistics or at least language training explained advisor certainly did the back in the early 1940s when I was an undergraduate a great deal of linguistic work was being done in the army language schools this was during the Second World War people were being taught languages where US forces might be deployed not sure exactly how it worked out I had a few personal experiences good friend of mine was sent to a Hungarian language school and he was deployed in Korea naturally which actually has a kind of a weak connection with Hungarian way back many thousands of years ago but I suspect a lot of it was pretty much like that we've also often been saved by like large strategic plans going around yeah but in later years there are issues which I think are not very well understood so take where I've been all my academic life MIT in the 1950s when I got there the Institute was overwhelmingly supported by the Pentagon that was every part of it including libraries the music department everything else forget the exact figure but could have been something like 90% I was working in a lab that was a hundred percent supported by the three Armed Services and it also happened to be the lab which was the center of academic anti-war resistance that's the lab where we started national tax resistance in 1965 helped organize the resistance support group resist which still this came to trial and spot trial a couple years later all of this was going on in a military lab 100% supported by the three Armed Services and it was of no concern to anyone because what's not recognized very well is that the Pentagon from the 1950s through the 1970s and to an extent today was the US government industrial policy system she wanted to develop the high-tech economy of the future the way it was done was to frighten the population into thinking the Russians are coming and then put money into what he came finally computers and the Internet lasers and micro technology the GPS in fact most of the high-tech economy that we know decades later literally it was handed over to private enterprise for marketing and profit and that continues so for example if in the 1950s if you walk around MIT or other major research institutions and took a look at the buildings that were around they would be electronic firms Raytheon eye tech others kind of feeding off the research that's done under taxpayer subsidy in the research institution if you walk around the same institutions today you'll see Pfizer Novartis of the pharmaceutical companies what's happened is that the cutting edge of research and development has shifted to an extent from electronics to biology so now taxpayers are funding unwittingly the high tech biology based economy of the future which will be privatized and handed over to private enterprise for marketing and profit it's more complicated than that obviously nothing is as simple as a couple of sentences but this is a large part of the way the American so-called market economy works and we're not alone on that planning means happen to be more advanced also because of way back in history could would we be safe and saying that without military funding the theory of transformational grammar might not have occurred well if it hadn't been for military funding you wouldn't have computers and much bigger things and transformational grammar you know that computers I never met satellites you know much of the basis for the modern high tech economy was funneled through the Pentagon kind of like the these days people are talking about big infrastructure projects and like the interstate highway system those of you who are old enough to remember will recall that the interstate highway system was hold the national defense system it was built taxpayers were supposed to funded because it was essential for our defense he had to move missiles around and things like that so the the national defense highway system of course what it really was was a way to undermine efficient transportation like rail transportation electric railways and so on and shift the energy system to the use of fossil fuels massive waste of fossil fuels that's a large part of the Anthropocene that were suffering from today the National Defense highway system was a part of that there were many other parts real estate things and so on in fact as you know there was one literal conspiracy in meaning the courts determined that it was conspiracy and find the perpetrators this was in Los Angeles where in the early 1940s General Motors Firestone rubber and Exxon what is now what's now Exxon Mobil's an earlier version of it got together and decided to dismantle the very efficient electric railway system in Los Angeles and replace it with Highways automobiles and trucks and so on those of you who know Los Angeles know what the outcome is that was a literal conspiracy they were brought to court the Court determined that it was legal conspiracy and actually sentenced them they find them my recollection is it was about $5,000 enough to pay for the victory dinner maybe something like that but these are the way this is the way the economy functions pretty generally and again it's not us just not just us goes back to early history many illusions about these things yeah you know there does seem to be a in sort of a cyclical pattern historically with nationalism and now authoritarian machines sort of a trend toward more of those you look at brexit Poland Philippines and so forth and perhaps here in the United States do you see this is it as as what is a cyclical event or do you see this as something that is growing ever closer to the precipice of dictatorship and so forth well there is what's called a rise of populism nationalism fever fear to the foreigner very easy to instigate in the United States the US has always been a very frightened Society maybe the safest country in the world but very frightened doesn't take much to scare people and if you think that Europe is very much different you should take a look at the polls their recent polls in Europe showed the majority of the population wants to keep all Muslims out of Europe all ok-hee worse there and it's a and people can easily be frightened this morning's New York Times you might have noticed an article on the front page about a group in Canada and some town in Canada which is mobilizing to prevent the imposition of Sharia law there's a slight problem there aren't any Muslims around but it can never be too careful one of the American states that may be Oklahoma has actually passed laws to ban Sharia law which is just imminent as as you can tell this is this is this morning I got a an email from a guy who was coming to interview me is it was born in German in Germany he lives in England and British citizenship he's a member of the Syrian writers organisation bitterly anti-assad on his go back a generation or two he Syrian he was stopped at Heathrow Airport but by Homeland Security and barred from coming to the United States we can't be too careful who knows we'll be coming here to kill us no it's kind of the same mentality is carrying a gun into the Starbucks if you have a cup coffee you know they may be coming for us there are roots of this in American history and deep roots and as I say England is not much different but the question we should really be asking obviously is why is this showing up everywhere right now and there's some pretty good reasons for that it has to do with the actual consequences maybe you can argue whether they were intended that they were certain predictable of the social and economic policies that were instituted in the late 1970s the so-called neoliberal programs the Washington Consensus as they were called a lot of fakery about it but large park was let the market handle everything as I've already indicated it's very far from that and if you look closely this massive subsidy doesn't very rich and powerful but for the rest let the market take care of them you have an extreme version of it if you take a look at the freedom caucus proposals today for healthcare Why should there be any right to health care if people don't have enough money to pay it's their problem they should have made better investments or found better parents or something like that it's not the problem of society that's the radical counterpart opposite end of the spectrum to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in fact what most people believe but that's a strain in American history and elsewhere the fear of Polish workers in England let's say the workers who are coming to do dirty work that English don't want to do and get ideas that they're somehow taking over or England there's a background for all of this the people who feel this have indeed suffered from the impact of the neoliberal programs so if you take the United States the richest most privileged country and the one that in many ways was least harmed by these programs even though they largely originated here go back to 2007 that's right at the peak of euphoria about the wonderful economy that Saint Alan Greenspan is running economists we're calling that the new moderation we've learned how to control the economy everything's going to be fine from now on this is right before the crash which ruined everything and incidentally undermine the entire intellectual edifice with no no impact which is quite an interesting phenomenon and intellectual history but we'll put that aside take a look at 2007 and look at real wages for American workers these are Supervisory workers you know guys who were working on a assembly line building things and so on their wages were actually lower real wages were lower than they were in 1979 when these neoliberal programs were initiated so there's been and it's just it's a symbol of what's been happening all over there's been stagnation or decline for a large part of the population showing up in all sorts of ways we now have this remarkable phenomenon in the United States of middle-aged mostly white male workers whose mortality is increasing that never happens in developed societies but mortality is increasing for this sector of the population and it's mostly diseases of hopelessness and despair these are people who don't want to get a handout from the government have contempt for people to do angry at them they want a dignified life where they can have self-respect and what they're doing feel they're doing something important it's all been taken away from them by very specific policy similar things are happening in England background for brexit in Europe the austerity programs that were imposed by the troika you know the governing authorities have devastated the economy economically they make no sense at all even the International Monetary Fund economists have coming out with papers and they don't make any sense but the IMF bureaucrats who are not the economists or Juncker part of the troika they're implementing them along with the European Commission which is unelected and the the bank which of course unelected and that goes back to the first part of the Universal Declaration again along with this attack on fundamental basic human rights the rights to a dignified life which our societies could easily provide with their resources along with that there's been a shark attack on democracy and people are aware of it and you can run through the evidence which shows it very clearly and one of the reactions is general hatred and contempt for institutions pretty much across the board they're not working for us we hate them and out of that can come many things some of the things that come out of that are very destructive and dangerous but other things that come out of it are extremely hopeful that we should pay close attention to what happened in the last elections here the most startling the event in the elections was not the election of Trump it was the success of Bernie Sanders that breaks from literally a century more of us political history us political has been well studied by very good political scientists Tom Ferguson and others a very good predictor of electoral success it's just campaign funding and also of the policies undertaken there other factors which you which converge to empty stress that outcome even more way before citizens united which drive open floodgates but it goes back a long time the and Sanders came along no funding no corporate funding a wealthy funding dismiss disregarded by the media a guy who was totally unknown unknown he was using scare words like socialist which means New Deal Democrat and he practically he could if it hadn't been for party shenanigans party managers he might will have won the election that's not only a radical change from American history but also a very promising and hopeful sign for the future and it's extended by popular attitudes today there was a poll a couple of weeks ago by Fox News of all people who tried to find who was the most popular political figure in the United States and one person was way ahead of anyone else Bernie Sanders and among young people even more all of that that's another form of what takes place when social and economic conditions are bringing about stress despair anger fear you know one kind of reaction is violence and xenophobia racism and so on another kind of reaction is futility let's just give up it's too big for us third kind of reactions let's do something about it and there's every reason to think that that can be done so there are no reasons for real despair very hopeful signs I think that's great you know you have a habit of being so comprehensive in discussing these topics and leading to the next logical topic that you just already expressed my next questions one being on the concentration of wealth and the ownership of the media by a few and it's its role in in in the role of money more more broadly in elections and you just pointed out one way around that but it's a very difficult course still when you've got the media controlled by corporations and most of those corporations have the same interests as as other corporations and so what's the prognosis in terms of how you practically what strategy is there to to roll that back well I think there are two parallel tracks both of which have been followed but one is to change the media and I think that's been done there's a lot wrong with the media the major media I'm talking about New York Times CBS Washington Post plenty wrong with them but I think they're a lot better than they were 30 or 40 years ago part of the reason is that the society has just become more civilized the impact of the activism of the 1960s and later years has simply been to educate people to change their attitudes on all sorts of things so for example take take say the two kind of core basic crimes American history through horrible crimes that's near extermination of the indigenous population and slavery indescribable crimes back in the 1960s they were particularly regarded as crimes so if you look at the leading anthropologists that best scholars in the 1960s what they were saying about indigenous population in the United States not just the United States whole continent was maybe a million people hunter-gatherers and straggling around didn't possess land so didn't mean anything to take away from them that's not there's no longer true either of scholarship or even what kids recent breeding school it's a long way to go but the history has been very significantly the false history has been very significantly overcome it's now possible for not just scholars but high school students to learn a good deal of what really happened and there is a reaction so for example the state of Arkansas a couple of months ago the legislature legislature initiated a legislation I don't know what happened to it to ban Howard Zinn's books from the school's you didn't have to do that 30 years ago because they couldn't have possibly entered into the schools that's a sign of progress significant progress pretty much the same is true of slavery the real nature of American slavery is just being exposed in recent years by serious scholarship I mean it's not that a lot of things weren't known you know they work but they were kind of hidden in arcane places now it's becoming public knowledge on the basis of very serious work which is bringing out entirely new information these are big changes well that affects media to the people in the media grew out of this culture they're more civilized than they were in the 1960s and 50s and the other path is just creation of alternative media which is far easier now than it was then far easier and can be done very effectively things like say Amy Goodman's Democracy Now are a real means for many people to get a view of the world that they wouldn't gotten before and many other things like that glenn greenwald's and intercept many others that you all know about so there's plenty of things that can be done it's the matter of grasping the nettle doing the things that you have opportunities for yeah it is interesting how with these with these populist changes and the way in which the candidates have continued to stoke really historical roots of racism and anti-semitism and the substantial rise in in both of those areas in Europe as well as here in the United States that's a really frightening thing I was taking my anti-semitism I mean I'm in my late 80s so I could remember the nineteen thirties and it was pretty scary not just what was happening in Europe which was terrifying but what was in ordinary life here so my my father was a my parents were teachers Hebrew teachers so they had a they kind of survived the depression you know they didn't start in fact the whole family was coming around being helped by the few people I'd judge around nineteen thirty seven I guess my father had enough money to buy a second-hand car we live in Philadelphia and my parents decided to take us in the weekend out to the nearby mountains just Poconos just to spend the weekend weekend vacation I had to get a motel there were the motels you had to look at carefully because there were word there were signs on them that said restricted restricted meant no Jews you didn't have to say no blacks that question didn't arise you know but no Jews 19 that's late 1930s I could tell you personal anecdotes of what it was like to grow up on the streets as a young Jewish boy and an Irish Catholic neighborhood very nice but when I got to Harvard in the early 1950s the anti-semitism was overwhelming there was practically no Jewish faculty one of the reasons why MIT became a major university is that outstanding people like say Norbert Wiener others couldn't possibly get jobs at Harvard well that was anti-semitism in the nineteen thirties forties and fifties there are problems now but it's nothing like that absolutely nothing like that it's much better than it was so it's not something to laugh at by any means those who have experienced it and lived through the periods of the hideous atrocities in Europe are certainly not going to disparage it but we have to recognize that it's become radically different by now Jews are one of the most privileged that may be the most privileged minority in the country and pretty much the same is true of so-called European anti-semitism so I think we should certainly not disregard it but to recognize how far we've come and not only how far we've come but why the progress was made that's what's critical because those are the things that we can continue to carry forward instead of succumbing to the futility and despair in building on that that discussion I'd like to talk about what is a sort of an under the rising area of resistance at least perceived resistance in poison and that's the rise in boycotts very distant voice various different areas and you were quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently noting that that you had come out against the BDS the boycott into Vistage divestiture and sanctions arguing that failed initiatives which is how you characterize much of the BDS movement arm the victims doubly by quote shifting attention away from their plight and to other issues such as anti-semitism and academic freedom and by wasting current opportunities to do something meaningful you want to elaborate on that or give us your thoughts and how you arrived at that position o mentioning boycotts we shouldn't overlook the fact that again as you all know there is a boycott movement right here of distinguished geographers who have called for a boycott of the mark and geographical association in protest against the kind of regulations and the procedures that the Trump administration is instituting the case of this Syrian actually British writer seer in origin who I mentioned before is an indication of what's happening that's an issue could certainly be thought about how should professional societies react to this kind of thing so for example should professional society meetings take place in the United States too serious question should they take place in a country where people from designated countries designated by the authorities are not allowed to come freely the Latin American Studies Association years ago we can to have conferences elsewhere because of the restrictions against Cubans dollars I think those are all things to be thought about now the BDS movement is a different matter first of all we have to make a distinction between the tactics BDS tactics and the BDS movement they happen to be quite different things so BDS tactics in the israel-palestine case were actually initiated in 1997 by an Israeli group who Shalom were hinari's group strongly anti occupation militantly had a occupation a very significant played a very significant role still group they proposed boycotts of the settlement and divestment from anything involving the settlements and that's been I myself have been involved in the Israeli BD activities there are no real sanctions as that's a state matter but these I've been involved in these things since late nineties when it took off and at the settlements now here questions arise the BDS movement which developed in 19 2005 has a different approach that's the movement not the tactics their approach calls for if you read the list of principles there is a set of principles if you take it literally they're calling for boycott of Israel divestment from Israel sanctions on Israel until then comes a long list of conditions some of which everyone knows are totally unrealizable like one of the conditions that's listed in this almost catechism is return of the refugees in accord with international law well first of all it's accord with international law a separate question but return of the refugees you can think whatever you like about the morality of that but everyone knows it is not going to happen there's no international support for it if there ever were that serious support Israel would go all out using nuclear weapons anything else to prevent it so it's not going to happen and dangling this hope in front of people living in miserable refugee camps and Lebanon and Jordan is not a good idea or moral position in my view if you take a look at the in all BDS is not a principle it's a tactic just as it was in the case of South Africa it's a tactic tactics have to be designed so that they're going to have favorable effects for the victims a tactics aren't designed so that the person who undertakes them can feel good that it's not a way to design package at least if you're if you have ethical imperatives you ask yourself what's the impact on the victims and if you take a look there's a record of significant success very significant success of BD really BD tactics aimed at the settlements say the Presbyterian Church for example big organization has taken a very strong stand on divestment and boycott of anything having anything to do with the settlements and crucially they aim also at US institutions US multinationals that are involved in the occupied territories that's very significant both for educational reasons and tactical reasons and that's been a big success and there are other successes like that and I think those are very good sensible tactics the European Union has taken some steps in that direction the human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have advocated similar things all of that makes a lot of sense I think in principle and it's tactically effective and it should go way beyond so take if there's ever going to be any significant progress in Palestinian rights it's going to require a major change in the United States as long as the United States continues as it has been doing for decades to provide an economic diplomatic military even ideological support for the settlement project they're not going to end they may take use different words but they're not going to end they're going to continue and the u.s. does not have to do that American citizens can prevent that in fact one critical tactic that I think or we pursued I've been advocating this for years is simply imposing American law American law so-called lay amendment bans any military aid to any military unit or group that is involved in systematic human rights violations well I don't have to go through the record but anyone who's looked at the wars in Gaza or what goes on in the West Bank has no doubt in Lebanon as well has no doubt that the Israeli army has been engaged in systematic human rights violations so therefore by American law we or cancel the military autonomy even a move in that direction could have significant implications very significant it's a little bit like the standard story for the press there are plenty of things we can do if you think them through ask what the consequences are what the possibilities and opportunities are and then pursue them seriously not because something makes you feel good but because it's beneficial to the victims that's the course and that should be uppermost all the time and I'd like to ask a question now about you know we have many many of our members or come from them come from China these days and we're really glad to have them as part of our organization I want to get your your thoughts on the rise of China which has been remarkable from an economic perspective and the you know it's extensive investments it now has around the world in name you imagine a time in the near future when when the dominant economy and the dominant sort of international network let's call it would I will see sort of transcend that of the US and in Europe go back a couple centuries 17th century China and India were the most advanced commercial and industrial centers in the world England had to steal technology from India's where it's on Industrial Development textiles shipbuilding and others it was so extreme that even when during the Napoleonic Wars when England was really in sometimes in dire straits Parliament banned import of superior Indian ships so as to protect the but the new British shipbuilding industry well of course that all changed through colonialism and now China is beginning to recover something like its traditional role the Middle Kingdom to each other's paid tributary it's in many ways a pretty ugly process and threatening in many ways it's had its positive consequence will China I mean there are now books coming out in fact there have been for decades recent one Gideon Rachman and others talking about the Asian century that the center of power is going to shift the first shifted from Europe to the United States now as Russia over the Pacific I don't think there's much reason to believe that China has quite a lot a very big economy about purchasing power parity roughly like the United States but it's a very poor country take a look at the UN Human Development Index China I think is around 90th India's maybe 130 and they've been pretty well stuck there they have plenty of huge problems that we don't face now also ecological problems this they don't have much in the way of rich agricultural resources the way we do and that's being destroyed China is taking sensible significant steps towards towards addressing the environmental catastrophe it's kind of astonishing that today the world is looking to China to first salvation as the United States is going backwards that's an astounding fact and China is doing it but they have plenty of problems I think it will be a long time before they become anything like the Western powers and wealth and privilege now United States power has been declining there's you've all heard the phrase America's decline common young common lament you can get Foreign Affairs in Maine International Affairs journal and had a page cover a couple years ago called is America over or something like that this is all fear-mongering American power has declined from its peak which was after the Second World War you have to go back and think what it was like second world war was very beneficial to the US economy the US wasn't much touched by the war other industrial economies were devastated or destroyed the US manufacturing practically quadrupled pulled us out of the depression a big fact it was a big backlog of technology other possibilities for the great growth rate of the following years the US had the know tinted statistics were very good in those days but it's some estimate that the US may have had almost half of world we'll probably not that high but something like that well of course that declined that was never going to last and it declined very quickly in fact the first step in the decline was China in 1949 an event took place which is called in modern US history the loss of China which is a very revealing phrase and I noticed that nowadays it's sometimes put in quotes because it's so ludicrous but for many decades it was called the loss of China meaning we own China and we lost it that's the assumption China became independent and then a major theme in modern American history was who lost China you know that's what drove called McCarthyism it went on way into the 60s John F Kennedy when he was escalating the war in Vietnam the saying he didn't want to be accused being the person who lost Indochina as if it's ours to lose that declined that was a serious blow to us power so the video is still remained by far the most powerful country in the world if you took it look at the US by the 1970s the international economy was becoming what's often called tri-polar three major centers North America based in the United States Europe based mainly in Germany and East Asia which at that time was based mainly in Japan now it's Japan the Asian Tigers and rising China and that was the Northeast Asia was already the most dynamic industrial area but a lot of it is derivative derivative so if you China is a huge assembly plant if you take say your i-pad own you know it's the company in charter who designs it is Apple biggest corporation in the world they farm out production to Foxconn and other subsidiaries Taiwanese big Taiwanese companies they hire cheap labor in China where it's assembled if you take a look at the profit that comes back from the iPhones it China gets very little Fox none gets more Apple gets most of it that's why the richest corporation in the world and they make sure they don't pay taxes by setting up their offices in Ireland and so on that's I mean that's China is developing undoubtedly and it's a significant fact most of the decline in global poverty over the last generation has been China which is not insignificant but they have plenty of problems and there's another issue which is barely discussed and is crucially important it's been brought up particularly by a young political economist named Sean Stars some very interesting work in which he investigates who owns the world's economy he points out that we have moved from a period where national economies were the major entities in world global economy they never were totally of course and we haven't totally moved away from it but there's been a drift towards an international economy where multinational corporations play an independent they're based in States they rely on States taxpayers have to support them and so on so they are based in national states but they have global reach they set up these complicated supply chains that's how you get the high phone story for example so he asked a simple question how much of the global economy is owned by US corporations turns out to be about 50% that's probably higher than the share of the global economy that was owned by the United States at the peak of its power and virtually every sector manufacturing the retail finance US corporations are either first or second a Chinese corporations are way behind and that's a different measure which isn't being used very much but you keep in mind when you think about what the economy how the global systems of elevate there's another dimension military and that's critical and in that the United States is way ahead of anyone else I mean US military spending is almost as high as most of the rest of the world combined and now one of trumps programs is to build up what he calls our debilitated military which already overwhelms any conceivable combination of powers and technologically it's way more advanced in every possible way in a space everything else a cyber war pick it and of course the u.s. is the only country that has hundreds of the military bases all of the world other countries may have one or two or something we have maybe 800 if you count but lily pads many more and military operations going on all over the world constantly that dimension the u.s. is absolutely supreme it's not something we should be proud of and it's not something healthy for the society but it's a fact so I don't see to get back to the question much chance of an Asian century in the sense in which people are lamenting not that it might not be a bad idea incidentally great thanks I'd like to you know one of the things that that's remarkable to me and over the series of introduced interviews we've done the years going way back is the king of your consistency and you keep trying to trip you up on a question that I'd asked earlier and see if you would change much and nice and watch you know and that's not a good character both stubborn yeah we'll get the when I first very first interview we did it was the foreign anarchist magazine called black black rose and one of the first questions I asked you was I'm going to read it and I think you still to this day you identify as a libertarian socialist is it the tag is the kind of an identity and so forth and to the extent that you have to identify yourself if you have to pick a name that's okay it's okay I should say that I would read you something of mine who's a philosopher had to contribute an essay to a collection of philosophical essays commenting on work of mine and he opened his essay by saying that he had a problem because the only ism I seem to believe in as truism which is not too wrong very good yeah in any case this article our first question was about our anarchism and its role it's post Henschel relevance if any to our current world and you answered that with some interesting ideas about how it might be relevant to an advanced technological society and I'll just read the question quickly and you can summarize your answer 1974 in your essay on notes on AIRC ISM you were pretty sympathetic to anarchism and then we talked about how there are some roots in geography with core Potkin so forth being anarchists and geographers he talked about reintegrating anarchism into the 20th century you see anarchism is being relevant to social problems in the advanced capitalist countries your answer was as you know anarchism anarchism covers a broad spectrum a picutre particular strain of this with Daniel Guerin at the time isolated and studied I think is a valuable valuable one it's one that converges pretty much with libertarian Marxism I think Marxism also covers a pretty broad spectrum and there's a point at which some varieties of anarchism is some brides of Marxism come together this is a topic that we might raise with David Harvey and it's talk tomorrow you're welcome to come and do they both they come together and out of that complex of ideas and Arcos in de Lucinda coalesced ideas and libertarian socialist ideas it seems to me that that there is a very applicable in fact I think those are exactly the appropriate ideas for an advanced technological society it seems to me that anarchism in that sense suggests certain principles of organization that are extremely realistic sort of a natural evolution with a high enough level of technology and communication and elimination of ownerless but necessary labor under those conditions it seems to be entirely possible and in fact essential to move toward these social forms so very much appropriate to an advanced industrial society you you hold those at years ago and I still think in fact I think there is interesting steps on that direction so for example take this huge problem of the industrializing American and just take a look at some of the things that have happened so for example in 1977 I think it was a US Steel decided to close down their plants in Youngstown Ohio major steel city built by working-class unions and labor in the steel and other manufacturing industries the Union offered to buy the plant and to hand it over to the workforce the company didn't like that probably for class reasons there is in case after case where multinational major corporations which are often run by sentence ears you know banks and so on don't prefer not to make profit if it will undermine class struggle so the idea that workers could take over and run a plant successfully it's not an idea that they want to foster and for that they're willing to take a cut in profits so it looked and seen studied carefully anyway it went to court the corporation won Staton Lindh it was the lawyer for the advocate for the Union continues to live there and fight for it but they didn't give up after that they turned to something else establishing small worker owned enterprises in the old Rust Belt the northern Ohio area around Cleveland integrated into the kind of economy that's developing they're kind of a service economy and some of this is working very well gar alperovitz has written very effectively about it both Seaver in the practice and these are things that certainly can be done and they could be done on a very large scale so take a couple of years ago in the midst of the crash as you recall the government Obama basically nationalized the auto industry pretty much took it over there were some choices at that point and the choice that was taken was determined by the ideological structure and the power structure internal to the country which could have been different if people like us were acting it could have been different there were two choices basically one choice the one that was taken was to bail out the companies hand them back to the same banks and managerially to random before from different faces but essentially the same institutions and have them proceed to produce cars okay that's what was done that there was a much more sensible option both in human political and even environmental terms and the auto industry over to its workforce and the community have them run it and have them produce what the country needs which is not more cars to make traffic jams but decent decent mass transportation which would make a much better life and a much healthier life and much a significant contribution to reducing the threats that we face well that was never considered but if it wasn't considered it's the fault of people like us we're the kind of people who should be acting to make it be considered and these things happen all the time on a small scale on major scale and this is all moves towards developing what Bakunin anarchist thinker one once called building the facts of the future within the present society cooperatives work around enterprises other other kinds of developments like that are can begin to build a better future within this society the same is true of the problem of the massive problem of climate destruction I'm in federal government right now happens to be a wrecking ball they want to destroy everything's asked as possible okay and the interest of short-term profit let's transparent but that doesn't mean it has to stop states can do things localities can do things that small groups can do things individuals kind of make to make a huge difference very big difference I think may be enough of a difference to prevent the wrecking ball from destroying all of us but it has to be done I've even simple things like there are a lot of institutions and I and I'd like to say even our institution which is works in the interspecies of between corporations and large governments and so forth in our in some ways a you know a very oppositional force to what is occurring now and so on anything I think that if you look at the DIY do-it-yourself economies and that are developing in Baltimore and Brooklyn and and in Detroit I grew up in I was born in Flint Michigan and grew up so the demise of everything and you know I was so I was just there again recently and it's remarkable how strong though the city is finally starting to come by really really and you know I've heard and I'm skeptic because I've heard it talked somebody can happen for 30 years now and and now it really is in fact I think we should hold a meeting in Detroit at one point in time and if we do um we do in here oh and of course our members never complain about anything but occasionally I get it word that though the hotels are too expensive so my my approach is we hold the meeting in Detroit hotel prices are going down because people are refusing to come to the United States not yet so we'll discuss this offline let them you know I thought well one way we could save money we could just buy everybody a house for $100 and they have that meeting and then but now unfortunate unfortunately for us the unfortunately for the city has been a massive movement into downtown Detroit from people all of the other DIY company on brooklyn baltimore berlin moving into the city as well as people from the surrounding areas to do it and the vacancy rate is about 1% and you need all kinds of small industries are it's really quite impressive now but on that note then i wanna i want to know i got a bone to pick with you but I've got a bone to pick with you ok you know it's been bothering me for a long time and that is that for my whole life wherever I go people call not come up to me they walk up to me I'm in a cafe I'm surely not minding my own business not bothering anybody they said are you are you no no Chomsky oh you know them are you know Chomsky no I said no I'm not I'm not done no I'm not alright but it keeps coming here you know I'm Chomsky and I said well I said well it's gonna get worse worse I said and their first at first first I said no I'm his son you know that didn't work out as I said then I tried other approaches and and finally I sort of reconcile began to reconcile myself to it when about know maybe 15 years ago you know your hair turned white and my hair was still brown and I want you to know my hair still brown I died I died I died at white so I look like you again but what happened is people started coming to me and they would say you know are you Woody Allen are you Woody Allen you know I get to work I said no no I'm not Woody Allen I'm Noam Chomsky oh my wife hilarya who's over there who knows Woody Allen and his in fact worked with him and she has a idea in mind to try to convince him to have a film in which he plays me or maybe I played him well I actually was my next sentence was going to be a request that you know I could perhaps you know I work a lot of hours at the AG nobody knows that you know around the clock weekends and everything else and so I was thinking maybe I could go away for a couple weeks couple months you know you could come in my place and people might not even know that I'm gone you know what anyway but I also want to ask you another personal person if you don't mind before we wrap up you know you're you know I mean you know you worked so hard for so many years you made so much done so many wonderful things and and then in the forefront of necessary battles and um I just wonder if you've ever just thought about you know maybe going to the South of France for a while retire and maybe maybe go to some kind of South Sea Island maybe take up the arts or musical instrument or you know knows what maybe would pursue a whole new career path and and the reason I asked that you know there are some rumors coming around that you are considering other possible other possible forms of offer of employment and there was a very respectable owned by The Washington Post publication that in print itself right on the print page it's carried a story about you possible next next next gig in Las Vegas the resident I want to know there's a lot of fake news we hear about fake news all the time and I just should lunch to the picture it's so always ended up there Oscar okay so you know there is a lot of fake news and I just want to confirm whether this was a rumor or really you're seriously taking on a whole new and profile we'll see was it okay thanks for bein such a good sport the difficulty of the onion with all soy [Laughter] you got to read this gotta read the story the onion is a kind of a spoof taste I think it's actually it is actually only why the Washington Post and so we're now at our point where I want to take a few minutes to make an award view and then we'll have some questions okay we're going to get the award in person um the the AG has a as its most prestigious award is the AG Atlas award which was launched in 2010 and it's designed to recognize and celebrate outstanding internationally recognized leaders who advance world understanding in exceptional ways not American exceptional but in in exceptional ways the image of Atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders is a powerful metaphor for this award program as our nominees are those who've taken the weight of the world on their shoulders and moved it forward whether in science politics scholarship for the Arts earlier recipients of the award included primatologist Jane Goodall international human rights and political leader Mary Robinson and civil rights icon Julian Bond so you're in good company Noam Chomsky has been selected as this year's recipient of the AG Atlas award as you know he's one of the world's leading public intellectuals he's written and lectured widely on linguistics philosophy science and everything Chauncey's wide-ranging intellect and a passion to work his long inspired geographers and his highly regarded contributions on contemporary topics concerning globalization and the intersections between under the economics and politics our great interest to AG members for these reasons and many many more we're proud and pleased to recognize professor Noam Chomsky with the 2017 AG Atlas award - this comes off the world is holy and [Applause] we're going to put this up here first with with the world on his shoulders significant to this and this is a this is basically this is the most androgynous Atlas that I was able to find there you go so you know also with that we also have a course a nice nice thing to you know put under that pile of books that you've been working to get rid of and then now so thank you all very much and then we have [Applause] Romita will have them back enough for you we'll put this up with up here while you're taking questions they will they need to know that this is an atlas so so now we'd like to take a few questions and this is a check on oh thank you okay do we have the people at the microphone the microphone set up and ready to go well where should people don't okay it's hard for me to see with these lights here so since I can't see didn't have people line up and we'll start on either aisle okay let's start over here please I know Danny Betts our Department of Geography Western University I can't decide if I wanna ask you about the geopolitics of outer space which is my subfield and I don't know if it's something you've thought about too much he did mentions space technologies and your discussion of u.s. army supremacy I want to ask you have thought about the expansion of neoliberalism and hegemony into that next step and using that space not in the literal sense as a means of control and dominance and also what you think in this kind of new promotion of Martian colonialization I know it's sometimes something that gets a laugh but within it are interesting narratives of colonialism and extension of the existing modes of power and I wanted to ask you if you've ever thought of those types of things and what your thoughts are well if you take a look at the the military planning the quadrennial reviews they regard control of space as a critical element in running the world they want to you know the ways of directing weapons that can hit a narrowly identified target within minutes from controls and outer space massive surveillance all sorts of other ideas and no doubt that's all being developed in fact you can read about it in the even in the public documents as far as inhabiting other planets are concerned but personally I would regard it as sort of basically a joke except for the fact that there are some pretty respectable people who take it seriously so it's even Hawking for example one of the great contemporary scientists has argued I presume seriously that since humans are heading for extinction by their own decisions and decisions of the only way the species can survive is by finding some other plan personally I can't take that seriously that Hawking is a serious person the there is an effort to kind of privatize space travel but it's you know kind of games for multi billionaires it would take a question over here now dr. Chomsky in 1967 you published the responsibilities of intellectuals and a lot of us are grappling with issues of how to be more engaged scholars especially during this time with such alarming circumstances and that's out there for people to read it print but I wonder if you have any updates to that you'd like to add for the 21st century and if you could just comment in general about the responsibilities of intellectuals well actually the Boston Review of Books which is the Boston counterpart of New York Review of Books a couple of years ago asked me to write an update which they in fact published and it is the first chapter in a recent book called who rules the world so it kind of looks at the problems from a fairly recent point of view I think this must have been 2007 if I were to write it today again you can find different circumstances all the time but I think the basic issues remain about the same as like the people who are called intellectuals may not are called that because they have a certain degree of privilege like maybe the janitor who cleans the floor of somebody's office understands world affairs and human affairs much better than the Nobel Prize scientist who sits behind the desk but he's not called an intellectual so intellectuals are people who have a sufficient degree of privilege and justified or not Authority so that they have opportunities to articulate Musa pinions or reach people with commentary and discussion of the world scene and also become involved directly in activism and ways which can help inspire others those are the consequences of privilege that privilege confers responsibility straightforwardly means you can do more things and people without privilege can and I think that's the essential message then comes the question how this responsibility is used how's the privilege used well if you look through history it's not very pretty overwhelmingly all the way back to the earliest historical records critical open-minded intellectuals have suffered in one way or another how it depends on the nature of the society but they have also made many achievements I'd like to ask the first woman in this line to step forward we got a whole bunch of men got up there so my name is Julia I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and I wonder if we may say that we're going through an epoch of extremes right now extreme uncertainty extreme lack of ideologies and collective cosmologies and worldviews extreme movement but extreme closure at the same time extremely individualism extreme poverty but also extreme concentration of richness and therefore extreme inequality extreme territorial and natural natural exploitation extreme threats human life as you mentioned in a plethora of ways so which would your advice be or even your warning be to the new generation of researchers and academics there are here today to listen to you how can we work better and how can we be better in view of the clock getting closer to midnight that's for instance these extremes epoch requires in your opinion more radical positions how what would you mean to be radical in this sense if this is any meaningful thank you did you hear that yeah I heard I mean I'm often asked for advice often by young people and I really know what to say I mean the kind of people who like us they have every opportunity available to us and we can do we enjoy a legacy of privilege and freedom that was handed down to us by struggles of people under much harsher conditions I mean some of the things that are happening they are indeed extreme it's the first time in human history that we're facing a real process progress prospective extinction that's new on the other hand the 1930s were in many ways a much more terrifying period repression in the United States in the past has been far worse than it is today people talk about repression the right to do it but there's nothing like Wilson's Red Scare or the COINTELPRO operations that went through the Johnson the Kennedy Johnson Nixon administration the and the rise of fascism in Europe was really a terrifying matter even before the Holocaust and we saw that so there's all kind of horrible things that have been the case in the past we have plenty of problems now we have lots of opportunities we have to try to achieve what we can so for example take say climate change I think a pretty good argument can be made that that the fundamental principles of capitalist society are and market societies are simply inconsistent with human survival so in that in that in that respect there's a need to make radical changes but you can't just say look let's make radical changes I mean radical changes in the structure of society can come about when the large mass of the population is convinced that what exists is not going to be responsive to their just needs and demands so therefore a wheeeeel change would exist and activists call them intellectuals aware of you like can try to help this process go forward but they can't create it out of nothing so maybe we need radical ideas okay let's prepare the ground for them that's about all we can do I think we've got time for maybe two more questions one over here I know my name is Ian I'm from the University of Winnipeg where you've had a big influence you know the propaganda be political punk band in the Mondragon movement and I'm Canadian and I haven't heard you talk about Trump so I want to hear your thoughts on Trump but I also want to hear your thoughts about you know you've worked in Universal grammar and I'm curious what you think of the possibility of humanities universal ability to cooperate the universal ability to have compassion and can we deal with what's going on in America and its impact on the world what we better hope that we can are both the worlds and real troll and we have no reason to doubt that we can so we can only try as hard as possible within the options and opportunities available to us the trumpism is too big a topic for a couple of minutes but there are some very striking things about what's happening in Washington what's going on is a kind of very systemic two-tiered operation one of them is Trump Bannen you know the effort to try to make sure you capture the headlines you're on the top of the news one crazy thing after another just to make sure that people are paying attention and the assumption is well they're going to forget later anyway so people don't talk anymore about the 3-minute legal immigrants and pretty soon they'll stop talking about the wiretap and you'll be onto something else I mean well everything is focusing on that the Cole Ryan Republicans who are the most might be the most dangerous and savage group in the country are busy implementing programs that they have been talking about quietly for years very savage programs which have very simple principles one make sure you offer to the rich and powerful gifts beyond the dreams of avarice and kick everybody else in the face and it's going on step-by-step right behind the bluster and that's and he take a look at the cabinet cabinet was designed that way every cabinet official was chosen to destroy anything of human significance in that part of the government it's so systematic that it can't be unplanned I doubt the Trump landed my impression is that his only ideology is me you know but whoever's working on it is doing a pretty effective job and the Democrats are cooperating cooperating a very striking way I take a look at the focus on Congress it's on the few decent things that Trump has been doing so maybe members of his transition team had contacted the Russians is that a bad thing I mean the ambassador recent ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock really had a blog where he pointed out it's exactly what you should be doing that's the job of diplomats and ambassadors and people coming in you they're serious problems and tensions you want to talk over if there's anything you can do about them instead of just building up force and violence so that's what the Democrats are focusing on and meanwhile all these other things are going on I'm not saying anything about them that we focus on withered and the effective is basically letting the baton Trump group control the what's presented to the public crazy things about wiretapping and did Susan Rice commit a crime or whatever tomorrow's will be well meanwhile the the parts of the governmental structure that are beneficial to human beings and the future generations are being systematically destroyed and with very little attention I think my feeling is that's what it looks like yeah we've got time for one more question I'll take it from over over here I just want to update you what you had spoken about finite set of elements producing infinite combinations back in your linguistics I ended up identifying them testing them and presenting them yesterday so thank you okay okay with that are you waiting my way I got one more question Tom why did you put my picture on the front of this book okay okay you all for coming

Channel: American Association of Geographers

Views: 23,391

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Douglas Richardson, AAG, American Association of Geographers, Boston, Annual Meeting, 2017

Id: uXHwyuS3TiA

Length: 103min 51sec (6231 seconds)

Published: Mon May 29 2017