Chomsky: There's an Overt Corporate Effort to Indoctrinate American Children
October 13, 2014 |
This article first appeared on Truthout.
History teacher Dan Falcone and English teacher Saul Isaacson spoke with Noam Chomsky in his Cambridge office on September 16, 2014, about education and indoctrination, the 1960s, the Powell memorandum, democracy, the creation of ISIS, the media and the way "capitalism" actually works in the United States.
Dan Falcone: We're in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Professor Noam Chomsky. I am Dan Falcone with Saul Isaacson, and this is actually the third time I've visited you. So I wanted to thank you for that. And since I am a teacher, I wanted to start off by continuing on the themes of democracy and education.
I have noticed students making very insightful and uplifting observations in the midst of chaos. For example, they noticed that support for Israel fell out of favor in certain mainstream circles, and that the recent police treatment of unarmed black teenagers in intensifying areas of violence is a crucial matter of concern. This, to me, is an example of reasons to be hopeful. Can this type of thinking be traced to the work done in the 1960s or is that an oversimplification in your view?
Noam Chomsky: I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.
When people denounced [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of. Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little, that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning in 1965.
By 1965, South Vietnam had already been practically destroyed. At least a couple of hundred thousand US troops were ravaging and began the attack on the north. You literally could not have mentioned this in Boston, which is a liberal city. The first time we tried to have a public antiwar demonstration on the Boston Common, which is where everything takes place, it was broken up; [we] couldn't have it. It was October 1965. I was supposed to be a speaker. Nobody could hear the speakers. The Boston Globe - the most liberal newspaper in the country - the next day, you can look it up on the internet, was full of denunciations of these people who were daring to question the validity of the bombing of North Vietnam. I mean, this is five years into the war. There's nothing like that anymore.
The Iraq War, for example, is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes. They were all affected, and so I think you and your students' perceptions are correct. It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.
There's actually a classic presentation of this which maybe we discussed, so stop me, but the study of The Crisis of Democracy, a very important book which was published. It's the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which was a group of liberal internationalists. For example, the Carter administration was entirely drawn from their ranks. It's basically where they come from; so kind of the liberal end of the mainstream spectrum.
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