Na 11 september 2001 begon de Amerikaanse dissident Noam Chomsky met het schrijven van op-eds, opiniestukken die door The New York Times Syndicate wereldwijd werden en worden verspreid. Desondanks heeft tot nu toe geen van de landelijke Amerikaanse massamedia ook maar 1 woord hiervan in hun colommen opgenomen. In de inleiding van Interventions, waarin alle tot nu toe verschenen opiniestukken zijn opgenomen, schrijft redacteur Greg Ruggiero: ´That our mainstream media system seems unwilling to tolerate a range of political thought wide enough to include Chomsky´s but is willing to market them outside our intellectual and geographic borders is ironic and revealing.´ En gelijk heeft hij. De New York Times wil graag geld verdienen aan dissidente gedachten, maar durft ze zelf niet af te drukken in hun krant. Tot zover vrijheid en democratie en vrijheid van de pers en meningsvrijheid. Men kan in de VS wel een mening hebben zolang die maar correspondeert met de officiele lezing van de werkelijkheid zoals verordonneert door de rijken en dus machtigen. De opiniestukken van Chomsky verschijnen overal ter wereld in grote kranten, behalve in de VS en in Nederland, want hier hebben de journalisten van de commerciele massamedia al een mening zonder overigens de feiten gedegen te kennen.
Vele jaren geleden interviewde ik Chomsky voor de televisie. Programmamaker en cameraman Frans Bromet bood het aan aan de Nederlandse omroepen, maar geen van de publieke omroepen had belangstelling. Chomsky? Wie is dat? Een dissidente intellectueel? O nee, dan niet.
Hier is een interview met Chomsky over zijn boek ´INTERVENTIONS
By Noam Chomsky
City Lights Books Open Media Series
234 pages $15.95
ISBN – 13: 978-0-87286483-2
http://www.citylights.com/
Since 2002, the New York Times Syndicate has been distributing op-eds written by the pre-eminent foreign policy critic and scholar of our time, Noam Chomsky. The New York Times Syndicate is part of the same company as the New York Times newspaper, and while readers around the world have had a chance to regularly read Chomsky's articles, the New York Times newspaper has never published a single one. Only a few regional newspapers in the US have picked up the Op-eds, such as the Register Guard, the Dayton Daily News, and the Knoxville Voice. Internationally, the Op-eds have appeared in the mainstream British press including the International Herald Tribune, the Guardian, and the Independent. Now, City Lights Books has just published a complete collection of these 1000 word Op-eds in a single book called Interventions.
On June 1st, 2007, Noam Chomsky spoke with radio host Sonali Kolhatkar about his new book:
Kolhatkar: In your April 2004 op-ed entitled "Iraq: The Roots of Resistance," you describe the false pretext of democracy that the Bush administration used to justify its war and then in March 2005 you lauded the real success of the Iraqi elections in that the US had actually allowed them to take place. Now a few years later what is the status of real democracy in Iraq?
Chomsky: The elections of January 2005 were, as I probably wrote there in my view, a real triumph of non-violent resistance. The US was trying in every possible way to prevent elections and finally had to give in just because it could not face a mass, popular non-violent resistance, which was far more effective than the insurgency. So it allowed the elections to take place but immediately moved to subvert them. And that's the situation we're in. I mean, you can't really have a functioning democracy under military occupation. You can have some elements of it but not much. Military occupation is too harsh. I mean, it's hard enough to find a functioning democratic system in a country that deprived of Democratic elections. Paris system, for example, of military occupation, their system has extremely serious flaws and in Iraq, it's far harsher. The elections as they took place finally were, as many observers, have pointed out it was kind of a census more than an election. It was sectarian voting and the conflicts are by now so extreme that the political system is kind of a shadow.´
Lees verder http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13019
Interventions is in de goede boekhandels in Amsterdam te koop.
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