Noam Chomsky — Writers & Company, March 27 1994

I'm Eleanor Wachtel and this is writers and company today dissident intellectual and world famous linguist Noam Chomsky described as a latter-day Copernicus Chomsky has turned around the way we think about language and about political discourse in democracies the most frequently quoted praise of Noam Chomsky originates in the New York Times Book Review it says Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today these words appear on the dust jackets of Chomsky's books and they're mentioned whenever reporters talk about Chomsky's political activism the irony is that for Chomsky the New York Times is one of the major perpetrators of what he calls a web of deceit or thought control in a Democratic Society the story goes that Chomsky's dentist noticed that he'd been grinding his teeth his wife observed that it wasn't happening at night when he was asleep eventually they figured out it was occurring every morning when Chomsky reads the New York Times Noam Chomsky is an iconoclast and an assiduous gadfly of power he speaks for no particular ideology and no party claims him despite his fierce critique of American foreign policy during the Cold War he was no favorite of the Soviet Union either his works even his scholarly writings on linguistics were banned there in Chomsky's view the responsibility of intellectuals is to speak the truth and expose lies he said that more than 25 years ago and he still believes that today the Oxford Companion to the English language says that Chomsky is considered to be the most influential figure in linguistics in the later 20th century in the late 50s and 60s Chomsky argued that humans have an innate capacity to learn language a kind of deep grammar that is bred in the bone and is part of our genetic makeup a fundamental element of being human he said is the ability to create language the impact of his work was so great it's been dubbed the Chomsky and Revolution according to the Citation Index in the arts and humanities and the social sciences skee is the most cited living author and he ranks eighth if you include living and dead writers beating out Hegel and Cicero Noam Chomsky is 65 years old and he maintains a daunting schedule he spends several days a week on the road lecturing 20 hours a week answering mail plus his day job as a professor of linguistics at MIT he produces about a book a year I estimated 45 titles and he said he didn't know for sure I talked to Noam Chomsky from National Public Radio Station WGBH in Boston the picture that I have is of a really tireless dedicated and even ascetic life and I not a long time ago that's how Norman Mailer described you after sharing a jail cell briefly because of a Vietnam War protests use the word ascetic how does that word sit with you it's more or less accurate I guess although you might do plenty of things too that are quite totally self-indulgent I even think increasing now that I have grandchildren can you give me an example of a self-indulgent playing with my grandchildren for example that's that's the maximum of self-indulgence I was waiting for something a little richer you know richer well well you know over the summer we I go into total hermit owed over the summer the only way I've been able I discovered over the years of the only way I can survive this schedule from beginning of September through the end of June is to disappear entirely over the summer and you know barely answer the telephone I see a couple of old friends and family comes by and that sort of thing and then I work most of my wife and I both work most of the day but we you know we'll take off in the late afternoon and go swimming or have a pair go say oh I have sailboat out there that's everything even during the summer you'll be working most of the day oh yeah most of the day you once said that it's not unlikely that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called the full human person then any modes of scientific inquiry might may hope to do and yet you rarely refer to work the imagination how have you been influenced by fiction that's hard to say I I read a lot of fiction I read a lot more when I was younger I do actually refer to it now and then but it's it creates one's sensibility in ways that are hard to explain understanding of people and what they do would enriches when one's intuition and particular ways I find it hard to point to when you read fiction what do you turn to I have fairly conservative tastes usually nineteenth early twentieth century literature sometimes modern things I was struck and maybe just the sort of the nature of the world that I move in which is more literary and I've struck my sentences that you said about how you'd always been resistant consciously resistant to allowing literature to influence your beliefs and attitudes insofar as I can so for example I would not like not just literature but the visual arts documentaries and so on I it it's one thing to have your your imagination stimulated and heightened and so on it's another thing to find the truth and to the one can't get out of one's skin naturally but to the extent that self-awareness and self-criticism allows I would try to put to the side intuitive feelings emotional reactions perspectives that are not determined by the evidence itself that's a obviously an unattainable ideal and I don't claim to attain it and I don't even know the extent to which I try but at least one ought to as a normative principle I think it's a good one Noam Chomsky I'd like to get at the origin of your sense of justice your sympathy for the underdog the origin like the origin of my life for and it's the origin of my life comes from having grown up in the depression I suppose and early childhood memories being people coming to the door and trying to sell rags or apples or something like that driving at a coming traveling in a trolley car past a textile factory where women are on strike and watching police riot where they you know beat the strikers and and then on to experience that isn't immediate the kind of experience that comes from reading from from film from secondary sources plus plenty of personal experience there's there's an from another point of view it just comes from the assumption that human beings have fundamental intrinsic rights which are infringed upon in in numerous ways leading to sometimes Grievous and injustice right before our eyes and a particular concern to the extent that we ourselves I myself let's say I'm involved in it so I'm much more concerned about crimes committed say by the United States where I have some degree of responsibility than for the crimes of Genghis Khan I could get upset about those but I can't do much about them what effect do you think it had on you to grow up in a neighborhood in Philadelphia that that was a pro-nazi during the early days of the war that was kind of frightening I was we were the open for large part of my childhood the only Jewish family in a neighborhood that was mainly German and Irish Catholic very anti-semitic most of the kids went to Catholic school in fact I should say that until I was well past the age of reason I still had a kind of a visceral fear of Catholics in Catholic schools it was hard to overcome when I met people like say the berrigan's and others although I knew it was irrational the the neighborhood was pro-nazi this was the 1930s and I recall celebrations when Paris fell my brother and I knew that we had particular paths that we could take not others to you know get to the bus or to the store or whatever I don't want to exaggerate that either I mean the anti-semitism was real but you could still play with the kids you know or you never knew what was going to happen next but so there's a little wariness but some to some extent part in the neighborhood that was always in the background and then of course the what was I was the what was happening in Europe was very frightening I mean I can remember listening to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies not really understanding that understanding my parents reactions and then by the time I was say you know eight or nine or ten are able to understand what was happening in the world to some extent watching one part of Europe after another fall to hitlerism I was that that was frightening especially when right near by me and around me I could see resonances of it so that your anarchist interests go way back to early childhood hmm how does that come about I find it a hard to picture a early chime yeah I know a young a young kid and having a grasp of that or an affinity to that well I was very miss is the 1930s remember which was a very lively exciting period with lots of political debate and discussion a lot a lot of it although his deep depression lots of hope for the future my family was a large part of it was unemployed working-class but though there was the poverty objectively speaking was worse than unemployment was certainly much worse than anything we have nevertheless there was a sense of hopefulness and discussion and debate and work and I grew up in the midst of that and became very much involved that interested in all these issues and by the time I was old enough to sort of act on my own at all I yeah I was frequenting fourth Avenue bookstores in New York anarchist offices picking up literature talking to people or members that vote relatives who were involved in these movements and concerns were important later holder other people I've met met now the Spanish Civil War was one event that really caught my interest enormous ly I actually guess the first article I wrote or can remember writing was right after the fall of Barcelona and you're through later I was beginning to pick up anarchist pamphlets and literature and think about what had happened then the and what it meant and those interests and concerns would simply never changed I mean my my own greatest political involvement at that time was with with in what was then Palestine what became Israel later this is early 1940s I was I grew up in a family in a virtual ghetto I suppose my family were my parents were both deeply they lived primarily in a in a Jewish environment a Jewish sort of first-generation immigrant environment they're both Hebrew teachers and the important thing in life was the revival of Hebrew culture the the cultural revival of in Palestine and the I would read Hebrew literature with my father from childhood 19th and 20th century Hebrew literature and older sources of course I spent my time in Hebrew school later became Hebrew teacher and out of all of this came a very connected with my political interest this naturally converged to an interest in Zionism and I was at that time that committed to a a wing of the Zionist movement which was Signet still significant in the 1940s which was opposed to a Jewish state though it was considered part of a live part of the Zionist movement and was concerned with the possibility of Arab Jewish cooperation in a framework of cooperative socialist institutions and so on I never actually joined anything I wasn't much of a joiner than the actual movements that were involved in these things I was I couldn't I was associated with them but I could never join them because they were all either Stalinist or Trotskyist and I was very anti Leninist already at that time and a Marxist in fact and so I well i agreed with them about lots of things i could never really become a member I did actually live on a kibbutz from those groups some years later for several more a brief period in fact thought of staying there but joining was an impossibility because of my darkest commitment these anarchists commitments going back to such a young age I mean the fall of Barcelona writing this piece for the school newspaper when you were 10 saying that from the time you were around that age around 12 or 13 that your views haven't really changed that much what is I'm obviously they've gotten more sophisticated but what does that say about you that your views would be so firmly fixed at such a young age hmm it means that I'm up - or maybe it's a matter of seeing that something's right and just sticking to it and trying to understand I mean I think that those are the right ideas when I think about human nature and human fulfillment and self-realization it seems to me that the intellectual tradition that led to modern anarchism and that includes incidentally the mainstream of classical liberalism which in my view is very much misinterpreted by that I mean Adams villains and humble - inspired mill the libertarian side of Russo Rizzo sort of complex but there is a libertarian side and that developed into the classical liberal tradition which was then seriously aborted in my opinion by the rise of industrial capitalism that tradition I think is of is a very valid one it leads to modern libertarian socialism were parts of the anarchist tradition and I think that it's it's basically a sense that human beings have a fundamental right to self-realization self fulfillment under conditions of freedom and voluntary association the classical liberals like Humboldt did not want they were not individualist sin the primitive style of Rousseau but so as Humboldt put it he wanted to remove the fetters from human society but to increase the bonds these being bonds of voluntary self Association classical liberalism in this form had was sharply critical of property values so for example Humboldt argue to get again that the worker who cultivates a garden is more its owner than the the person who simply enjoys the fruits of the other's labor but may technically own it Adam Smith's anti capitalism derives from the same root a recognition and he was in many ways an anti-capitalist his recognition that division of labor is ultimately intolerable because it will turn every human being into something as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a creature to be therefore thereby undermining the essence of human nature which is the right to create freely and constructively under one's own control and without external constraints out of this comes a conception of freedom and rights and so organization which places any form of authority and domination under challenge asks that it justify itself sometimes such justifications can be given maybe under contingent historical circumstances or maybe more deeply but the burden of proof is on the system of authority and domination quite typically that burden can't be met in which case one will try to work with others to overcome that those structures of authority and domination and to increase positive freedom freedom not simply in the sense of removal of say state controls but freedom in the sense of forms of social organization that allow people to realize their their their potential their their their need to be active creative and or whatever other aspects their personality may have have there been any societies where these ideals have been put into effect yeah in every society to some extent so for example at our society to some extent these ideas or realized to other extent than other respects they're not what we seek if we're honorable and my opinion is the respects in which they are not met which are enormous and those we try to confront and remove remove those fetters create new social bonds in Humboldt's terms it's 30 years now since you made a decision to become an activist to commit so much of your life to political action it was 1964 you were a successful linguist you had a family everything was sort of perfect have you ever looked back have you ever thought about the things that you had to give up oh sure lots it I knew right away I mean as a as you mentioned this we've discussed I hadn't really changed my views at that point but I did decide that it was just intolerable to symp and intolerably self-indulgent merely to take a passive role in the struggles that were then going on so signing petitions and you know sending money and showing up now and then in a meeting and so on I thought it was critically necessary to take a more active role and I was well aware of what that would mean it's not the kind of thing where he could put a foot in and then you know in the water and get it wet and then leave you go in deeper and deeper and I knew that I would be following a course that would confront privilege and authority and would therefore be my own views which were indeed highly critical but I didn't have much of an effect when I expressed my opinions and small groups or to you know our so let's say refused to get clearance in the lab at MIT or something like that it would become a much a larger part of life and the damaging part as I proceeded I have no illusions about the nature of the intellectual community its conformism its techniques for marginalizing or trying to eliminate critical and independent thought it's always been true remains true and I had a fair picture of where it was going didn't was unhappy about it means giving up lots of things but felt it was necessary and there are many compensation what what sort of things did you give up and what what sort of damage would have did you have to endure well you know I live in a world in which a world of constant lies vilification denunciation and also simply marginalization and what I gave up is lots of free time to work on things that I find really exciting as I do right now plus just the other you know the large parts of life just disappear I'm so for example large parts of personal life simply disappear for plain physical reasons because they has 24 hours what pushed you over into that level of activism back then it was a combination of what was happening in the civil rights movement the the growing us war in Vietnam which by 1964 was very serious and that I felt I should say completely hopeless about it at the time recall that in 1964 there was virtually no opposition to the war no organized opposition or vocal opposition in fact that didn't develop four years later and it seemed to me highly unlikely that it would ever develop what did develop a couple of years later came to me as a big surprise and the early stages were by no means pleasant so for example as late as take say Boston which is where I live which is quite liberal City maybe the most liberal city in the country until late 1966 that means when there were a couple hundred thousand American troops in South Vietnam and the US had been bombing North Vietnam for regularly four than a year and a half and till about then it was virtually impossible to have a public outdoor demonstration against the war in Boston even meetings and churches were attacked they were just physically attacked and it was even true of meetings in in churches I will remember in early 1966 when public meetings and downtown churches were simply physically attacked and that was considered right so there was no protest against that by the liberal community they in fact on the contrary there was protest against these people who were daring to question and criticize American state power and it's it's exercise and that's pretty much what I expected I also got involved very quickly and the resistance movement and felt that anticipated that that would have unpleasant consequences like for example years in jail which was not remote at that time Noam Chomsky in Boston he's my guest today on writers and company on CBC stereo and in the United States on the news and information station of Minnesota Public Radio I'm Eleanor Wachtel now back to my conversation with linguist and political radical Noam Chomsky you're sharply critical of American foreign policy everywhere in the world I think that's probably even an understatement I get the sense that it's not so much that the United States behaves badly because you recognize that all countries act out of self-interest and if I can quote you violence deceit and lawlessness our natural functions of the state any state and given that the United States is such a big and powerful state it only follows that it will do all that in spades but what really seems to enrage you is the hypocrisy of the American system that it claims to take a high road is that true the hypocrisy of the political leadership doesn't particularly enrage me I just take that for granted but what I do what what what I do find well rage is the right word I guess and never get over this emotion though I realize it's impropriety is the way in which the educated sectors behave in the manner of commissar class it's their deceit and distortion and subordination to power and unwillingness to face the realities in front of them that it's just from a an aesthetic or emotional point of view I find it hardest to tolerate maybe because I sort of live in those circles yeah I should I should understand that objectively that that's their role as much as it's the role of a person who wields state power to be deceitful but it's the distinction is nevertheless there emotionally no but commissar class you're referring to intellectual world or academia of the media the role that you expect more from I don't expect any more from them and I never did it's just that seeing what happens day after day in not all of course I don't exaggerate but in large parts of the media and in educated respectable educated sectors rather generally that strikes me is just appalling and intolerable though I recognize that that's an emotional reaction because I never expected anything else and I don't know either in fact if you look back at history you even go all the way to the earliest sources this is the way it's always been say to take the Bible you know the earliest literary source that we have and consider the people who are now respected the prophets well they were then reviled they were you know imprisoned driven into the desert hated and so on in large part because of their both because of their moral teachings and because of their geopolitical analysis a large part of what they gave was what we would today call a political or geopolitical analysis they warned of the consequences of policies that were being taken the people who were honored at that time were those who we now call false prophets and I think that that that that there are good reasons for that obviously pandering the power will lead to respect and authority and privilege condemnation of immorality of the abuse of power of the destructiveness for the general public of the use of power such policies will lead to antagonism on the part of those who have the capacity to to use violence or to organize masses against people who question their authority that's obvious and the picture that you see in the Bible is one that replicates itself over and over again in every society including ours I don't want to accuse you of presumption but do you identify with these prophets in the world no I would say that this is true of every critical element in any society I mentioned that because it's the classic example how does the media do what it does I mean is it as the target of your critique the hypocrisy of the media is a key subject they they claim to be gadfly's but you you find that they their work in a blender and complicit way how do they do that and how does it work so well I should say incidentally that the media are not fundamentally different in my opinion from a substantial part of scholarship and intellectual opinion so say the journals of opinion and the action you know the operations of those who call themselves public intellectuals or whatever are not very different from the media the media are a lot easier to study because there's a ton of material and you can look at it systematically and it's there and day by day and so on but what they bring out is not unique how does it work well they they operate within a rather generally there again there are exceptions these are these are overwhelmingly true generalizations I think they operate within a framework of assumptions and understanding which are supportive of existing power structures which tend to exclude or downplay or some sometimes totally eliminate or even lie about actions of domestic power state and other power in our societies that means corporate financial state power actions that are that they that are conducted by these power centers that are inhuman violent harmful to human values and human interests those are marginalized and downplayed and a picture of the world is presented that is conducive to and that tends to justify their authority and their actions in fact if the institutions didn't behave that way they themselves would be undermined and replaced by others that do so for example if the New York Times lets say started telling the truth about the world including the truth about the exercise of domestic power financial corporate and state power it would not exist for very long it after all is a major corporation selling a product other businesses it relies on its relationships to the state for a good bit of its function and this would be gone also if individuals entered into the major media at high managerial positions I include by that cultural managers like editors and columnist and so on who did not if such and of individuals moved into those positions who hadn't internalized those values they wouldn't last very long now it's not that the people are lying I think they're being honest but for the most part that they get where they are because they've internalized values that are supportive to power although on you know again I don't want to say claim that it's monolithic so for example the Boston Globe just ran an op-ed of mine a couple of weeks ago and I have you don't have personal friends there all the way up to the top editors over the years so it's it's it's it's a complicated country yes yes it's a you any you know and any kampala scription of any complicated system is going to be misleading it is over what it we happen to have a highly effective doctrinal system and a very narrow ideological spectrum but there are exceptions furthermore it's widened over the years in my opinion so for example the media are considerably more open now in my judgment than they were say thirty years ago why do you think that is I think it's because the country's changed and when the country changes its institutions change so the the public is far more critical and far more dissident just by orders of magnitude than it was thirty or thirty five years ago I mentioned a little while back that the even in the mid sixties 1965 in 1966 in a liberal city like Boston public demonstration say on the Boston Common or even meetings and churches were simply physically attacked often by students incidentally with the support of the media liberal media in this city that's an inconceivable today in fact the the the gently move the the attitudes and perceptions and understanding of the general population have changed radically on a whole host of issues well let's take take what's in some ways the most striking the original sin of American society is what the founding fathers were honest enough to call the extermination of the native population that's one which that's the the the people like John Quincy Adams were pretty appalled by at at least in his later years but in American culture that was really not recognized until the 1960s I mean when I was growing up we played kids played cowboys and Indians we were the Cowboys and felt nothing of it until the 1960s when a major cultural change took place in the United States there was no recognition of the horrifying atrocities that led to our living where we are and doing what we do the fact that the American industrial revolution like the English Industrial Revolution was based on extermination of the natives or expulsion of the native population in the United States and then in you know enslaving masses of people well to something certainly known in a certain sense but it wasn't recognized as the major crime that it was it's only since the 1960's that there has been even in scholarship I should say a recognition of the enormity of what happened to the native population and a general willingness to at least come to try to come to terms in some some ways with that extremely ugly aspect of our history you could see it in 1992 it was assumed that the Quinn Centennial would be a celebration of you know the discovery and liberation of the hemisphere that didn't happen not at all and it didn't happen because the public simply wouldn't tolerate it 30 years ago that's exactly what it would have been well those are that's one aspect of a of an improvement in moral values of a of a cultural advance which is quite significant shows up in many other ways with regard to feminist issues ecological issues solidarity with third world peoples a different respect multiculturalism is a case in point all of these things have their as in the case of any popular movement there's gonna be a fringe which is unpleasant ridiculous maybe intolerable but the main development is quite significant I think and it has affected the media as well so the kinds of the kinds of support for us violence and terror that would proceed without question in the 1960s that you might find them in short bursts today but they would be open to criticism in a sense in a manner that was not true then it's very nice to hear you talk this way after going reading a lot of very fiercely critical books of yours of American point this out all the time I mean I don't put it you know I don't put it in headlines I know I know that's true Chomsky in Revolution in linguistics suggests that we're born with this linguistic silver spoon in her mouth was the capacity to acquire language that Nature has given us this headstart on language it also does seem to go beyond language it seems that at heart a more democratic a more optimistic view of humankind it could come out of it you can I don't want to push it too hard because when you get beyond language and you know some aspects of vision and a few other things real scientific knowledge begins to drop off very fast and we're back in the area where we started at the beginning looking at literature in history and experience and intuition and so on but it can be used as the basis for a rather optimistic view and indeed was if we go back to the to the Enlightenment again these connections of this kind were in fact drawn well for example by home Baltimore so who I mentioned earlier who developed a kind of an optimistic view of human nature the idea that the human nature is based on a what was later called an instinct for freedom a drive to be free creative outside the free of external constraints and so on and that indeed came from a basically Cartesian picture saying that some asked the fundamental aspects of human nature in particular human freedom are simply beyond the outside the range of any mechanism that at the core of human nature is what was called as far back as the 16th century a generative capacity a capacity to create to innovate to construct from the resources of your own mind the principles on which your knowledge is based and in fact to construct new thoughts to express new thoughts the idea that the intelligence is a generative faculty in this sense goes back at least to the late 16th century and was developed richly in the Cartesian Revolution and later picked up by the romantics and in the Enlightenment and entered into political theory in this in a way which is rather natural though by no means proven the belief that at the core of human nature is this drive for self fulfillment under conditions of free action undertaken by oneself and out of one's own volition so from the point of view of say Humboldt again of the every person is at heart an artist and if they act a craft a craftsman let's say who acts under his or her own volition is an artist if the same craftsman does the same thing under external control well as humble puts it we may admire what he does but we hate what he is did you have a lot of faith in an ordinary common sense that people with only they had all the information would make the right decisions and at the same time you probably more than most of us have spent a lot of time scrutinizing international atrocities being aware of what goes on in the world and looking at it when most of us even if the information we're available to us don't really want to or our too preoccupied elsewhere with our daily lives to spend to pay that kind of attention mm-hmm well you know how optimistic or pessimistic I or some other person is is really not important I mean suppose that I were to believe that there's let's say 2% probability that if people are brought to see the actual facts of the world about them then they'll act in a moral and humane way then I would devote myself to that 2 percent and so would any reasonable person to enhancing that 2 percent probability and seeing what can be done with it no I haven't you think it's a much much greater than that I should say incidentally that this kind of what in my view is so and what you describe as optimism about people's capacity to act in decent humane ways when they understand the realities that's shared by by people in power almost universally if you look through history including just today you'll very rarely if ever see a say a statesman or a leader of some sort turn to the public and say look it would be an our interest to go slaughter those guys over there or to rob them or torture them or terrorize them so therefore let's do it you never find that what you find is an elaborate set of rationalizations and excuses and quite elaborate constructions developed by intellectuals which make it appear as if robbing them and torturing them and killing them and so on is right and just well why bother with that unless you're afraid at some level of your consciousness then if people know the truth they're not gonna let you get away with it Noam Chomsky you've occasionally been chided by your friends for not coming up with enough positive alternatives for not coming up with some revolutionary strategy to get at the root of problems how do you respond to that it's image is that part of here is that part of your job sure I mean to the extent that I first of all I don't think that anybody certainly not me is smart enough to plan in any detail a you know a perfect society or even a you know the society to show in detail how a society based on more humane commitments and the and concern for human values would function I think we can say a lot about what it would be like but we can't spell it out in great detail furthermore what it would be like I think is a reasonably well understood and has been for in some ways for centuries we would like to see a society in which people in which we overcome course of institutions absolutist unaccountable institutions should not be tolerated in our time that means primarily the financial and corporate centers which are basically totalitarian and character and are now transnational and scale and the state powers that and by now larger than state powers that respond to their interests and the same is true for structures of authority and domination down to the level of inside the family those should be combated and overcome we should work for democratic control in communities in workplaces over investment decisions eliminating hierarchic relations and relations of dominance among people and states and ethnic groups and so on all of that understandable I think you can go on to describe in greater detail how possibilities about how such freer and more democratic structures might might function but the real answers will come by experience and testing we don't nobody understands enough to say you couldn't spell out in detail in the mid 18th century the parliamentary democracy might work you had to try it the general ideas could be there but you had to try them and explore them and the experiment with them and so on and the same is true of expansion of freedom and democracy and justice today as for a revolutionary strategy I've never heard of one when I look over history the only strategy I see is trying to educate yourself to help others become educated to learn from others to organize and to the extent that organization proceeds to take action to try to relieve injustice to extend freedom and so on now that action can take many different forms so just in my own life I've been involved in things ranging from direct resistance to giving talks or you know thinking part in meetings and the the there are no further secrets as long as far as I'm aware I mean the problem is one of dedicating oneself to the extent you can at least nobody's a saint the dedicating oneself to the tasks that have to be undertaken and you know we can see what they are you used to draw parallels between the Soviet Union and the United States as to power blocks and the Soviet Union the the dictatorship resorted to violence to maintain control in the United States it was more as democracies do relying more on propaganda since the breakup of the Soviet Union do you see any I I know the what's confronting us now into when we look in that direction is obviously not particularly positive but do you take anything positive to come out of that well the elimination of Soviet tyranny is a major step for human freedom in fact in my view it's a great victory for socialism contrary to the propaganda of both of the great power blocs the Western power bloc in the eastern powered power bloc contrary to their propaganda the Soviet Union from its first days from the days when Lenin Trotsky took Lenin and Trotsky to power was militantly anti-socialist in every respect they immediately destroyed the socialist institutions and understood what they were doing it was done in principle so there's a great I think there's an opening for freedom on the other hand the Soviet Union though most of Eastern Europe quite predictably in my opinion is now being driven back to a third world level to a large extent that's what the third the Cold War was about the no part in an international society dominated by private capital and private power and it's it's state manifestations no sector that a large part of the world is just kind of a service area the south or the third world or given one or another designation former colonial world and no part of it is permitted to be to pursue an independent path doesn't matter whether it's Grenada or you know or a sixth of the world and to a large extent the Cold War was thought about that really began in 1917 and 1918 as the better historians notice ok the West the more powerful combatant one war meeting the rich and powerful sectors in the West won the war the large part of the population in the West lost the war in fact the Eastern Europe or large parts of it is now returning to its third-world origins pretty much where it was back at the early part of this century that means a very serious decline and it also means enrichment remember a third world Society has sect typically as any of our dependencies have sectors of great wealth and privilege and Eastern Europe does as well so take Russia the the economies collapsing people are suffering UNESCO really recently reported that there's about an excess of they estimate about half a million deaths a year in the Soviet Union since 1989 as a result of the collapse including the neoliberal reforms that are imposed on them on the other hand they're selling were Mercedes Benzes for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a shot than in Moscow than in New York and the people who are buying them are often the old Communist Party leaders there's what's sometimes called in the make Latura capitalism they're the victors of the Cold War not the people of Russia large parts of Eastern Europe are returning to a kind of third world service role that offers new weapons against working people in the West so General Motors our howdy and so on can find workers in Eastern Europe at a fraction of the cost of Western workers who are now being called upon by the business press to abandon what are called their luxurious lifestyles and to reduce them set to to become more competitive meaning to face the fact that it's easy to gain profits and power by exploiting much cheaper labour in the east now when General Motors moves over to say Poland they of course insist on a let's say a 30% tariff protection or something of that kind as VW does when it goes to the Czech Republic because they don't believe in free markets they believe in free markets for the poor not for the rich state power and protection for the rich but these are the consequences of the end of the Cold War and sure they're not pretty on the other hand there is the elimination of one of the worst systems of tyranny of human history and that offers all sorts of possibilities of liberation and new scope for human spirit and human freedom I'd like to thank you very much thanks again for taking the time and coming in thank you thank you Noam Chomsky in Boston many of Chomsky's books are published by black rose in Montreal his 1988 CBC masse lectures are available from Anansie books and the Chomsky reader is available from Random House

Channel: Tannhauser108

Views: 1,725

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: noam chomsky, chomsky, noam, cbc, canada, interview, eleanor wachtel, writers, company, philosophy, science, politics, socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, united states, imperialism

Id: IZ0tRpYKmwo

Length: 50min 10sec (3010 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 24 2013