Noam Chomsky Day

It was Noam Chomsky Day a couple of days ago. If you've read enough of his essays or listened to enough of his talks/interviews, you will notice there are certain things that he repeatedly brings up. So I thought I would make a small post with some Chomsky primers.

• The USA was founded on two cardinal sins: genocide of the Amerindian peoples and slavery.

• Both the ancient Greeks and American "founding fathers" saw a problem with democracy: given the vote, the masses would democratically choose to forcibly redistribute wealth from the upper class to the rest, which they appropriately saw as unfair. Aristotle thought the way to combat this was to reduce wealth inequality. Madison thought the solution was to reduce democracy.

• By the time the Second World War was over, the USA had approximately half the world's wealth (Yep, you read that right.) American power slowly but surely declined as time went on, with the USA nowadays owning approximately a quarter of the world's wealth. Interestingly, it's American multinational corporations that hold around half of the world's wealth today (Again, you read that right.)

• When Adam Smith talked about the "invisible hand" he wasn't talking about some wonderful self-regulating aspect of capitalism that would arise without question and we should worship as capitalists. He simply thought that the landlords would be guided by their conscience to not allow rampant abuse and inequality of the working class. Thus, it would be as if the wealthy are "led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society." I'll let you decide how that worked out.

• Wanna wage "war on terrorism?" Stop participating in it.

• Socialism was so demonized, especially in the West, because it had the two greatest propaganda machines working to equate it with Soviet Communism. The USA did it to delegitimize socialism by associating it with an undemocratic, repressive and murderous dictatorship, the USSR did it to try and ingratiate itself with the positive outlook the working class had of socialism.

• We have come to believe "anarchism" means chaos, law of the jungle, etc... but that is quite wrong. On its most basic pillar, anarchism asks only one question: is the current system of power a just one? If the answer is anything but yes, anarchist thought argues that the current system should be dismantled and replaced with something more just. Chomsky himself is a libertarian anarchist or libertarian socialist.

• On his book Manufacturing Consent (1988, co-authored with Edward Herman) he argued that US mass media follows, regurgitates and enable corporate and state interests through a series of self-imposed filter, without coercion, ie. the end-result is not readily distinguishable from the coercive propaganda under a dictatorship.

Hopefully this picked your interest and/or informed you a little bit if you weren't familiar with one of today's biggest intellectuals.

Read more of Chomsky's thoughtful pieces:

Who Owns the World?

Wars of Terror

A Roadmap to a Just World — People Reanimating Democracy

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Human Rights in the New Millennium

US Foreign Policy in the Middle East