A Brief Interview with Noam Chomsky on anarchy, civilization and technology
NOAM CHOMSKY interviewed by LEV CHERNYI, TONI OTTER, AVID DARKLY, and NOA
This very brief interview was obtained immediately after Noam Chomsky arrived in Columbia, Missouri to deliver a lecture on “The New World Order” on April 1, 1991. Unfortunately, when taping began in the middle of our conversation, Noam announced that he had to leave in 5 minutes, so any plans for a more organized and extensive interview had to be scrapped. Anarchy magazine staffers Lev Chernyi, Toni Otter, Avid Darkly and Noa participated in the discussion. This is what we talked about once the recording began — as Noam answered a question regarding his perception of North American anarchists.
Noam Chomsky: … I think if you counted up the number of people who would regard themselves as involved or sympathetic you’d get a pretty large number, but this doesn’t necessarily mean much, because the connections are pretty weak.
Lev Chernyi: I was curious if you try to any extent to keep up with the anarchist press in the U.S. or North America?
Noam: Yes, I guess I subscribe to most of it — more out of duty than anything else I guess.
Lev: Do you ever read Fifth Estate, for example?
Noam: Yes.
Lev: Do you have any sympathy for their anti-civilization perspective?
Noam: Not a lot. I mean I’ve always felt much more attuned with the parts of the anarchist movement that were interested in and took for granted the existence of industrial society and wanted to make it free and libertarian. So at least that’s why I’ve always been inclined much more toward the anarcho-syndicalist tradition. I don’t think that there’s anything else that has any real relationship with ongoing life. Something’s got to happen to the 5 billion people in the world. They’re not going to survive in the Stone Age.
Chomsky Info for more
‘All The News That’s Not Fit To Print’
by NOAM CHOMSKY
Let us turn finally to columnist Nicholas Kristof (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/kristof-that-threat-worked.html), who triumphantly instructs those skeptical of Obama’s military strikes that the threat of violence can work. As he explains, “For decades, Syria has refused to confirm that it has chemical weapons. Now, facing a limited strike, its position abruptly changed to: Oh! We do have them after all! And we want to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention! We want to show them to United Nations inspectors.”
Let us put aside the standard and useful fabrication that Syria had refused to confirm that it has chemical weapons until the Godfather waved his bombs. In reality, that was officially conceded long ago, as reported in the London Financial Times, July 24, 2012 (http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/83da4c76-d4c2-11e1-bb88-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz21XerGevZ) – unlike the state that has illegally annexed Syrian territory, which has not conceded even that it has nuclear weapons, though there is no doubt that it does.
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