22
Apr
Noam Chomsky Listens to Talk Radio
Cross-posted from ShockJocks.org
Noam Chomsky tells ex-New York Times reporter Chris Hedges he has “never seen anything like this.’”
“This,” says the man Hedges believes is “America’s greatest intellectual,” is the frightening mood of the country — “the level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions,” and the “self-destructive fantasies” that have Chomsky warning “that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.”
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told Hedges. “The parallels are striking.
“I don’t think all this is very far away,” he added. “If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
Apparently the noted linguist has been hearing some shocking things from America’s shock jocks — and their audience.
“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
In case you think Chomsky’s ire is limited to conservatives, however, think again! “Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the press, the universities and the political system,” notes Hedges, “Who serve as a smoke screen for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this is why Chomsky is hated, and perhaps feared, more among liberal elites than among the right wing he also excoriates.”
“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky says. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”
I not Mr. Chomsky claim to be and am America’s greatest intellectual. His mistake is based on his lack of knowledge of the Medieval pseudo-religious roots of both parties. The Democrats are based on the worldly reformation wing of Catholicisim–which is why they are stuck on the principle of altruism–using absolute power to help the neediest but doing nothing to stop the poor, however they got that way, from reproducing and passing the responsibility for their children on to others at gunpoint. Their dangerous quality lies in their profound anti-science—they don’t see the need for the categorizing definition which alone can save us from the fantasies and generalized lies their opponents are using to attack government, morality and individual rights every day in ten thousand ways. Science is the only realistic antidote to antithiworldly pretensions by non-thinking pseudo-religious would-be dictators. The Republican Party on the other hand therefore is based in the doctrinaire, not the moderate wing, of church militant Lutheranism–with its emphasis on working oneself to death, obeying infallible authority in the name of morality and practicing “pragmatism”–self-sacrificing acceptance of the total failure of one’s “perfect” leaders as the alternative to judging their failures with a realists’ mind. This postmodernism is what’s killing us; and one can be angry for instance at the failure of Democrats to undo the damages of neocon Reaganomic oligarchic-pretend capitalism. but the source of the crime, the flaw, the god-playing and the destructive rhetoric is not disappointing responders but rather as always the criminals themselves–scofflaws, right-wing cabalists, militant groups of failed thinkers calling their own mental helplessness a call to rebellion. Mr. Chomsky is right about the weakness of a former republic whose wage-slaves can’t figure out why they need freedom of speech or “regulated responsible speech”, let alone why they need rights, not public interest lawmaking totalitarianism. Regulations empower individuals acting noncriminally; laws only define and set levels of punishment for criminals. A nation of laws under any party is totalitarian. So the danger to the US comes I say from right-wing noisemakers and corporate media ‘tsars’, as well as smug Democratic fellow postmodernists ; but the main problem at present is that the neocons and their paranoid right-wing activists are unwilling to participate as responsible individuals in government, society and real monastic religious orders–not that in response to their attempted shutdown of government, their slanders, “dirty tricks”, voting machine frauds, faked science, falsified data, rewritten history, swiftboating, lies, denials, and claims of hyperbolic moral superiority–which they utterly lack–Democrats instead of repeating and refuting their words believe that we can go on with business as usual. We can’t–not in a country being run like a crazed corporate scheme; not in one headed by elitist looters willing to enslave, impoverish, rob and leave behind their worker-victims, asking only that they practice massive overconsumptional consumerist absurdity as their price of admission to be willing victims . Victims of absolute power’s corrupt survivors of anti-intellectual academics, self-serving liars preaching about bipartisanship for everyone else and
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:51 pmfinancial thievery and bribing of the perpetrators of a government run by tyrannical elitists, exclusively for tyrannical elitists alone.
“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky says. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”
April 24th, 2010 at 3:49 am