Admiring Noam Chomsky

Chomsky Tells it True

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t is amazing to me, how the rest of the civilized world admires Noam Chomsky, devours his books of political analysis, and yet he is hated in his own country. Every stripe of American conservative curses him. Mainstream Media avoids him as if he were the swine flu itself. Publishers reject his manuscripts preferring instead, to publish such garbage as Sarah Palin's book, Anne Coulter's mad ravings and the laughable "historian" who tried to show that liberals were the inspiration and true function of Hitler's Third Reich. Why? After all, Chomsky's books are invariably numbered among the Top Ten sellers list of The New York Times. By not publishing Chomsky you would seem to be passing up a big money maker.

True!

So why would corporate bosses willingly pass on the chance to make a big profit?

The more deeply you study Chomsky's work the more easily you understand why he is the source of deep distress among Neo-cons and other conservatives. In the words of Harold Pinter, at the Nobel Prize Ceremonies, Noam Chomsky does what few do, and he will not be intimidated, or back down. Youtube has videos of interviews with both admiring students and young, idealistic journalists, and not so admiring conservatives of the ilk of William Buckley, Jr. There is even the now famous interview on Firing Line where Buckley becomes so demoralized that he threatens Chomsky with physical violence.

Buckley flashes the baby blues, but he also slows down to an intellectually feeble limp in Chomsky's company.

Chomsky is despised in America for one simple reason: he tells the truth. The truth, you see, is very embarrassing to both the Big Bully of a central government and the big business concerns who run the government. And telling the Truth in a country whose business it is to lie; to create and dispense immense amounts of propaganda, through the agency of a Mainstream Media which has become nothing more than the handmaiden of liars, has become a radical and revolutionary act.

This video, however, shows Chomsky offering some potent insights. On government, he points out that although the public outcry against George W. Bush's unprovoked invasion of Iraq was huge and unprecedented, the Federal government's response to the anti-war demonstrations was zip, zero, nada. Bush and Cheney played "Let's Carpet Bomb, Kidnap, Torture and Murder the Innocent" with their fingers in their ears, while Halliburton poisoned our soldiers and Exxon gobbled up as much oil as they could illegally steal and then gouged the public to the tune of obscene profits. How do these sleazoids get away with such outrageous criminal activity? Again, easy. They simply shape the thoughts of the citizenry. Thus, it isn't difficult to grasp the thrust of Chomsky's most famous work, Manufacturing Consent.♦

Chomsky: Government In the Future

The Real Enemy of the People

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oam Chomsky makes one grateful that we have access through Youtube.com, to his far ranging political insight and strenuous logic. Somehow, for me at least, the image and the sound of the voice combine to make for quicker absorption and comprehension of big ideas, although books are a good tool for preservation of thought in low-tech mode. Here is Chomsky recalling a ditty composed by a Canadian Economist on the subject of Globalization:

The poor complain, they always do,
But that's just idle chatter,
The system works for most of us,
At least for those who matter

Be sure to watch the alternative videos parts 2 and 3 of the Government in the Future, which will show themselves after this one is done.





Once you've established yourself in the basics of political theory by viewing the above series of 3 videos, then it is time to go to the issues which define the present moment in American history: namely, that America is not a Democracy.

So what is it?

Good Question!

America is something now called, technically: A Polyarchy.

A polyarchy is a type of government system put forward by none other than James Madison, (great American that James was, he said with his tongue way into his cheek)) which purports that the people don't really count for anything except as unknowing pawns who through propaganda are persuaded that it is their mission to protect and uphold the handful of the wealth and power elite.

How is this done?

Through the ownership and absolute control of the Main Stream Media. The most blatant example of this tactic is Rupert Murdoch's buying of the Wall Street Journal. And then eliminating whatever integrity of honest journalism the WSJ might have had. Another example which comes to mind because my local newspaper, The Statesman Journal, is run by the huge right-wing conglomerate, Gannett. So? What's the big deal. Try writing a letter to the editor which espouses a liberal point of view. See if they publish your letter. Based on my own experience, I'd say chances are not good. But they will fall all over themselves to publish a letter to the editor, from a tea-bagger, upholding the most extreme kind of Fox News propagandistic thinking.




And here is a short video which speaks to the Republican purview which says that the earth is an infinite garbage can. It also addresses the view that "the private gain is the public good." This is a gloss of the ideas about the so-called Free Market as put forth by Adam Smith in his book, The Wealth of Nations, which Crony Capitalists point to and quote till you want to puke. But the problem is that these Republican idiots did not really read the whole book. Had they read the entire book they would have seen that even Smith qualifies his theories with a warning that the Free Market must be equally available to the smallest citizen or none of it will work. Indeed Smith goes even futher and says that, "A nation is only as wealthy as it's poorest citizen!"


The private gain is the Public good theory was best encapsulated in automaker GM's dictum that "what is good for GM is good for the country." As we have seen, that view wrought immense destruction of our precious infrastructure. And indeed, in this speech, Chomsky adds that

it has long been understood that this view has consistently led to the utter destruction of the very culture which fostered such a notion.

The idea has been massaged by conservatives until it has been so corrupted that George Bush, who remarked that the Constitution was merely a piece of paper, and indeed, one that got in his way, could have so twisted the meaning to become perhaps the most appalling treasonous and downright criminal expression of an entire rogue administration, in American history. (Why is he not in Jail?) If the ideas of Freedom and Democracy are not infinitely valuable to each human being, and not just the mouthing of the words by brainwashed stooges who parrot what the power elite tells them to say, we are lost not only as a culture but as a species and as citizens in the Universe.♦

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