Showing posts with label George orwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George orwell. Show all posts
Monday, December 3, 2018
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (Part 1 of 3)
A great interview by Chris Hedges of Noam Chomsky. Nothing much to comment for me on this, except to reiterate that North American & European people think that they are living in a democratic & free society where you are free to speak & think as you wish. But it is what instilled in them through their education system.
Public Relations (PR) system works so well that it subtly sends the message to the public that you are expected to follow the authority, regardless of how wrong that authority is. A large section of the public believes whatever spews out of the governments' mouths. Another section of the public, even if it doesn't believe governments' lies, still follow what the government tells them to do because they are trained to think that that's how the system works.
How can there be any so-called "democracy" in a country when its public is considered as "bewildered herd" & "ignorant & meddlesome outsiders," & are treated as "spectators" instead of active participants in making the internal policies of the country?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Let's begin with a classic paradigm which is throughout the Industrial Revolution, which has been cited by theorists from Marx to Kropotkin to Proudhon and to yourself, that you build a consciousness among workers within the manufacturing class, and eventually you lead to a kind of autonomous position where workers can control their own production.
We now live in a system, a globalized system, where most of the working class in industrial countries like the United States are service workers. We have reverted to a Dickensian system where those who actually produced live in conditions that begin to replicate almost slave labor--and, I think, as you have written, in places like southern China in fact are slave [labor]. What's the new paradigm for resistance? How do we learn from the old and confront the new?
NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think we can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution. It was, of course, earlier in England, but let's take here in the United States. The Industrial Revolution took off right around here, eastern Massachusetts, mid 19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system--men and women, incidentally, women from the farms, so-called factory girls--and they bitterly resented it. It was a period of a very free press, the most in the history of the country. There was a wide variety of journals, ethnic, labor, or others. And when you read them, they're pretty fascinating.
The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings who were being forced into what they called wage slavery, which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact, this was such a popular view that it was actually a slogan of the Republican Party, that the only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for a wage is supposedly temporary--pretty soon you'll be free. Other than that, they're not different.
And they bitterly resented the fact that the industrial system was even taking away their rich cultural life. And the cultural life was rich. You know, there are by now studies of the British working class and the American working class, and they were part of high culture of the day. Actually, I remembered this as late as the 1930s with my own family, sort of unemployed working-class, and they said, this is being taken away from us, we're being forced to be something like slaves. They argued that if you're, say, a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell your product, you're selling what you produced. If you're a wage earner, you're selling yourself, which is deeply offensive. They condemned what they called the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Sounds familiar.
And it was extremely radical. It was combined with the most radical democratic movement in American history, the early populist movement--radical farmers. It began in Texas, spread into the Midwest--enormous movement of farmers who wanted to free themselves from the domination by the Northeastern bankers and capitalists, guys that ran the markets, you know, sort of forced them to sell what they produced on credit and squeeze them with credit and so on. They went on to develop their own banks, their own cooperatives. They started to link up with the Knights of Labor--major labor movement which held that, as they put it, those who work in the mills ought to own them, that it should be a free, democratic society.
These were very powerful movements. By the 1890s, workers were taking over towns and running them in Western Pennsylvania. Homestead was a famous case. Well, they were crushed by force. It took some time. Sort of the final blow was Woodrow Wilson's red scare right after the First World War, which virtually crushed the labor movement.
At the same time, in the early 19th century, the business world recognized, both in England and the United States, that sufficient freedom had been won so that they could no longer control people just by violence. They had to turn to new means of control. The obvious ones were control of opinions and attitudes. That's the origins of the massive public relations industry, which is explicitly dedicated to controlling minds and attitudes.
The first--it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell--he didn't have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan "Peace without Victory". And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn't play Beethoven. And they succeeded.
Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. Again, you can guess what it was. And they've at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into warmongering fanatics.
And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found--the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.
The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a "new art" in democracy, "manufacturing consent". That's where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was "engineering of consent". The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We're the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be--I'm quoting--"free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd", the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"--the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be "spectators", not participants. And every couple of years they're permitted to choose among one of the "responsible men", us.
And the John Dewey circle took the same view. Dewey changed his mind a couple of years later, to his credit, but at that time, Dewey and his circle were writing that--speaking of the First World War, that this was the first war in history that was not organized and manipulated by the military and the political figures and so on, but rather it was carefully planned by rational calculation of "the intelligent men of the community", namely us, and we thought it through carefully and decided that this is the reasonable thing to do, for all kind of benevolent reasons.
And they were very proud of themselves.
There were people who disagreed. Like, Randolph Bourne disagreed. He was kicked out. He couldn't write in the Deweyite journals. He wasn't killed but he was just excluded.
And if you take a look around the world, it was pretty much the same. The intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause--all sides, Germans, British, everywhere.
There were a few, a fringe of dissenters, like Bertrand Russell, who was in jail; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in jail; Randolph Bourne, marginalized; Eugene Debs, in jail for daring to question the magnificence of the war. In fact, Wilson hated him with such passion that when he finally declared an amnesty, Debs was left out & had to wait for Warren Harding to release him. And he was the leading labor figure in the country. He was a candidate for president, Socialist Party, and so on.
But the lesson that came out is we believe you can and of course ought to control the public, and if we can't do it by force, we'll do it by manufacturing consent, by engineering of consent. Out of that comes the huge public relations industry, massive industry dedicated to this.
Incidentally, it's also dedicated to undermining markets, a fact that's rarely noticed but is quite obvious. Business hates markets. ... Markets, if you take an economics course, are based on rational, informed consumers making rational choices. Turn on the television set and look at the first ad you see. It's trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. That's the whole point of the huge advertising industry. But also to try to control and manipulate thought. And it takes various forms in different institutions. The media do it one way, the academic institutions do it another way, and the educational system is a crucial part of it.
This is not a new observation. There's actually an interesting essay by--Orwell's, which is not very well known because it wasn't published. It's the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn't feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn't say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press "is owned by wealthy men" who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.
But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you've gone to all the good schools, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say--and I don't think he went far enough: wouldn't do to think. And that's very broad among the educated classes. That's why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder--you should knock off England first. That's called criticism.
And sometimes it's kind of outlandish. For example, there was just a review in The New York Times Book Review of Glenn Greenwald's new book by Michael Kinsley, and which bitterly condemned him as--mostly character assassination. Didn't say anything substantive. But Kinsley did say that it's ridiculous to think that there's any repression in the media in the United States, 'cause we can write quite clearly and criticize anything. And he can, but then you have to look at what he says, and it's quite interesting.
In the 1980s, when the major local news story was the massive U.S. atrocities in Central America--they were horrendous; I mean, it wasn't presented that way, but that's what was happening--Kinsley was the voice of the left on television. And there were interesting incidents. At one point, the U.S. Southern Command, which ... gave instructions to the terrorist force that they were running in Nicaragua, called the Contras--and they were a terrorist force--they gave them orders to--they said "not to (...) duke it out with the Sandinistas", meaning avoid the Nicaraguan army, and attack undefended targets like agricultural cooperatives and health clinics and so on. And they could do it, because they were the first guerrillas in history to have high-level communications equipment, computers and so on. The U.S., the CIA, just controlled the air totally, so they could send instructions to the terrorist forces telling them how to avoid the Nicaraguan army detachments and attack undefended civilian targets.
Well, ... it wasn't publicized, but it was mentioned. And Americas Watch, which later became part of Human Rights Watch, made some protests. And Michael Kinsley responded. He condemned Americas Watch for their emotionalism. He said, we have to recognize that we have to accept a pragmatic criterion. We have to ask--something like this--he said, we have to compare the amount of blood and misery poured in with the success of the outcome in producing democracy--what we'll call democracy. And if it meets the pragmatic criterion, then terrorist attacks against civilian targets are perfectly legitimate--which is not a surprising view in his case. He's the editor of The New Republic. The New Republic, supposedly a liberal journal, was arguing that we should support Latin American fascists because there are more important things than human rights in El Salvador, where they were murdering tens of thousands of people.
That's the liberals. And, yeah, they can get in the media no problem. And they're praised for it, regarded with praise. All of this is part of the massive system of--you know, it's not that anybody sits at the top and plans at all; it's just exactly as Orwell said: it's instilled into you. It's part of a deep indoctrination system which leads to a certain way of looking at the world and looking at authority, which says, yes, we have to be subordinate to authority, we have to believe we're very independent and free and proud of it. As long as we keep within the limits, we are. Try to go beyond those limits, you're out.
Public Relations (PR) system works so well that it subtly sends the message to the public that you are expected to follow the authority, regardless of how wrong that authority is. A large section of the public believes whatever spews out of the governments' mouths. Another section of the public, even if it doesn't believe governments' lies, still follow what the government tells them to do because they are trained to think that that's how the system works.
How can there be any so-called "democracy" in a country when its public is considered as "bewildered herd" & "ignorant & meddlesome outsiders," & are treated as "spectators" instead of active participants in making the internal policies of the country?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Let's begin with a classic paradigm which is throughout the Industrial Revolution, which has been cited by theorists from Marx to Kropotkin to Proudhon and to yourself, that you build a consciousness among workers within the manufacturing class, and eventually you lead to a kind of autonomous position where workers can control their own production.
We now live in a system, a globalized system, where most of the working class in industrial countries like the United States are service workers. We have reverted to a Dickensian system where those who actually produced live in conditions that begin to replicate almost slave labor--and, I think, as you have written, in places like southern China in fact are slave [labor]. What's the new paradigm for resistance? How do we learn from the old and confront the new?
NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think we can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution. It was, of course, earlier in England, but let's take here in the United States. The Industrial Revolution took off right around here, eastern Massachusetts, mid 19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system--men and women, incidentally, women from the farms, so-called factory girls--and they bitterly resented it. It was a period of a very free press, the most in the history of the country. There was a wide variety of journals, ethnic, labor, or others. And when you read them, they're pretty fascinating.
The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings who were being forced into what they called wage slavery, which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact, this was such a popular view that it was actually a slogan of the Republican Party, that the only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for a wage is supposedly temporary--pretty soon you'll be free. Other than that, they're not different.
And they bitterly resented the fact that the industrial system was even taking away their rich cultural life. And the cultural life was rich. You know, there are by now studies of the British working class and the American working class, and they were part of high culture of the day. Actually, I remembered this as late as the 1930s with my own family, sort of unemployed working-class, and they said, this is being taken away from us, we're being forced to be something like slaves. They argued that if you're, say, a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell your product, you're selling what you produced. If you're a wage earner, you're selling yourself, which is deeply offensive. They condemned what they called the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Sounds familiar.
And it was extremely radical. It was combined with the most radical democratic movement in American history, the early populist movement--radical farmers. It began in Texas, spread into the Midwest--enormous movement of farmers who wanted to free themselves from the domination by the Northeastern bankers and capitalists, guys that ran the markets, you know, sort of forced them to sell what they produced on credit and squeeze them with credit and so on. They went on to develop their own banks, their own cooperatives. They started to link up with the Knights of Labor--major labor movement which held that, as they put it, those who work in the mills ought to own them, that it should be a free, democratic society.
These were very powerful movements. By the 1890s, workers were taking over towns and running them in Western Pennsylvania. Homestead was a famous case. Well, they were crushed by force. It took some time. Sort of the final blow was Woodrow Wilson's red scare right after the First World War, which virtually crushed the labor movement.
At the same time, in the early 19th century, the business world recognized, both in England and the United States, that sufficient freedom had been won so that they could no longer control people just by violence. They had to turn to new means of control. The obvious ones were control of opinions and attitudes. That's the origins of the massive public relations industry, which is explicitly dedicated to controlling minds and attitudes.
The first--it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell--he didn't have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan "Peace without Victory". And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn't play Beethoven. And they succeeded.
Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. Again, you can guess what it was. And they've at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into warmongering fanatics.
And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found--the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.
The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a "new art" in democracy, "manufacturing consent". That's where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was "engineering of consent". The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We're the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be--I'm quoting--"free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd", the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"--the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be "spectators", not participants. And every couple of years they're permitted to choose among one of the "responsible men", us.
And the John Dewey circle took the same view. Dewey changed his mind a couple of years later, to his credit, but at that time, Dewey and his circle were writing that--speaking of the First World War, that this was the first war in history that was not organized and manipulated by the military and the political figures and so on, but rather it was carefully planned by rational calculation of "the intelligent men of the community", namely us, and we thought it through carefully and decided that this is the reasonable thing to do, for all kind of benevolent reasons.
And they were very proud of themselves.
There were people who disagreed. Like, Randolph Bourne disagreed. He was kicked out. He couldn't write in the Deweyite journals. He wasn't killed but he was just excluded.
And if you take a look around the world, it was pretty much the same. The intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause--all sides, Germans, British, everywhere.
There were a few, a fringe of dissenters, like Bertrand Russell, who was in jail; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in jail; Randolph Bourne, marginalized; Eugene Debs, in jail for daring to question the magnificence of the war. In fact, Wilson hated him with such passion that when he finally declared an amnesty, Debs was left out & had to wait for Warren Harding to release him. And he was the leading labor figure in the country. He was a candidate for president, Socialist Party, and so on.
But the lesson that came out is we believe you can and of course ought to control the public, and if we can't do it by force, we'll do it by manufacturing consent, by engineering of consent. Out of that comes the huge public relations industry, massive industry dedicated to this.
Incidentally, it's also dedicated to undermining markets, a fact that's rarely noticed but is quite obvious. Business hates markets. ... Markets, if you take an economics course, are based on rational, informed consumers making rational choices. Turn on the television set and look at the first ad you see. It's trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. That's the whole point of the huge advertising industry. But also to try to control and manipulate thought. And it takes various forms in different institutions. The media do it one way, the academic institutions do it another way, and the educational system is a crucial part of it.
This is not a new observation. There's actually an interesting essay by--Orwell's, which is not very well known because it wasn't published. It's the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn't feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn't say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press "is owned by wealthy men" who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.
But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you've gone to all the good schools, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say--and I don't think he went far enough: wouldn't do to think. And that's very broad among the educated classes. That's why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder--you should knock off England first. That's called criticism.
And sometimes it's kind of outlandish. For example, there was just a review in The New York Times Book Review of Glenn Greenwald's new book by Michael Kinsley, and which bitterly condemned him as--mostly character assassination. Didn't say anything substantive. But Kinsley did say that it's ridiculous to think that there's any repression in the media in the United States, 'cause we can write quite clearly and criticize anything. And he can, but then you have to look at what he says, and it's quite interesting.
In the 1980s, when the major local news story was the massive U.S. atrocities in Central America--they were horrendous; I mean, it wasn't presented that way, but that's what was happening--Kinsley was the voice of the left on television. And there were interesting incidents. At one point, the U.S. Southern Command, which ... gave instructions to the terrorist force that they were running in Nicaragua, called the Contras--and they were a terrorist force--they gave them orders to--they said "not to (...) duke it out with the Sandinistas", meaning avoid the Nicaraguan army, and attack undefended targets like agricultural cooperatives and health clinics and so on. And they could do it, because they were the first guerrillas in history to have high-level communications equipment, computers and so on. The U.S., the CIA, just controlled the air totally, so they could send instructions to the terrorist forces telling them how to avoid the Nicaraguan army detachments and attack undefended civilian targets.
Well, ... it wasn't publicized, but it was mentioned. And Americas Watch, which later became part of Human Rights Watch, made some protests. And Michael Kinsley responded. He condemned Americas Watch for their emotionalism. He said, we have to recognize that we have to accept a pragmatic criterion. We have to ask--something like this--he said, we have to compare the amount of blood and misery poured in with the success of the outcome in producing democracy--what we'll call democracy. And if it meets the pragmatic criterion, then terrorist attacks against civilian targets are perfectly legitimate--which is not a surprising view in his case. He's the editor of The New Republic. The New Republic, supposedly a liberal journal, was arguing that we should support Latin American fascists because there are more important things than human rights in El Salvador, where they were murdering tens of thousands of people.
That's the liberals. And, yeah, they can get in the media no problem. And they're praised for it, regarded with praise. All of this is part of the massive system of--you know, it's not that anybody sits at the top and plans at all; it's just exactly as Orwell said: it's instilled into you. It's part of a deep indoctrination system which leads to a certain way of looking at the world and looking at authority, which says, yes, we have to be subordinate to authority, we have to believe we're very independent and free and proud of it. As long as we keep within the limits, we are. Try to go beyond those limits, you're out.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Noam Chomsky interview to RT
Chomsky ... always hits the nails on the head. As I always have said in my blog that there's no such thing as "democracy" in the so-called Western, developed countries. The government does whatever it feels like to do, either domestically or internationally, while the public feels something else completely.
Millions of Americans don't have enough food. Almost 60,000 Americans are homeless in NYC alone (since 2004). But billions were spent on Iraq & Afghanistan wars. Thousands of American soldiers died. For what? Taliban are back in Afghanistan. Drugs production is back in full force, & actually, even more than Taliban time. Iraq & Syria are completely broken down now. Prominent Americans, e.g. Donald Trump, himself are saying that the world was better off with tyrants like Gaddafi & Saddam than what we have now.
At this point, we can only reiterate that age-old proverb to Americans & Europeans: "you reap what you sow"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Major American media organizations diligently parrot what US officials want the public to know about global affairs, historian Noam Chomsky told RT. To US leaders, any news outlet that “does not repeat the US propaganda system is intolerable,” he said.
The culpability of the West – namely the US – for world affairs, such as the Ukrainian conflict or tensions with Iran, is another idea that is not permissible in leading American media, Chomsky said, adding that world opinion does not matter when that opinion counters US strategy.
“The West means the US & everyone else that goes along,” he said. “What’s called the international community in the US is the US & anyone who happens to be going along with it. Take, say, for example, the question of Iran’s right to carry out its current nuclear policies, whatever they are. The standard line is that the international community objects to this. Who is the international community? What the US determines it to be.”
He added that, “any reader of [George] Orwell would be perfectly familiar with this. But it continues virtually without comment.”
“The most interesting one is the charge that Iran is destabilizing the Middle East because it’s supporting militias which have killed American soldiers in Iraq,” Chomsky told RT’s Alexey Yaroshevsky.
“That’s kind of as if, in 1943, the Nazi press had criticized England because it was destabilizing Europe for supporting partisans who were killing German soldiers. In other words, the assumption is, when the US invades, it kills a couple hundred thousand people, destroys the country, elicits sectarian conflicts that are now tearing Iraq & the region apart, that’s stabilization. If someone resists that tact, that’s destabilization.”
Chomsky also related American media propaganda to recent moves by US President Barack Obama to reach out to Cuba, which the US has long considered a state sponsor of terror while instituting a harsh embargo regime. Chomsky said top American media outlets go to great lengths to pit Cuba -- & not the US -- as the isolated party in the Western Hemisphere.
“The facts are very clear. ... We know what happened. The Kennedy administration launched a very serious terrorist war against Cuba. It was one of the factors that led to the missile crisis. It was a war that was planned to lead to an invasion in October 1962, which Cuba & Russia presumably knew about. It’s now assumed by scholarship that that’s one of the reasons for the placement of the missiles. That war went on for years. No mention of it is permissible [in the US]. The only thing you can mention is that there were some attempts to assassinate [Fidel] Castro. And those can be written off as ridiculous CIA shenanigans. But the terrorist war itself was very serious.”
Obama has changed course on Cuban policy not for reasons pursuant to freedom or democracy, as is peddled in the US media, Chomsky said.
“There is no noble gesture, just Obama’s recognition that the US is practically being thrown out of the hemisphere because of its isolation on this topic,” he added. “But you can’t discuss that [in the US]. It’s all public information, nothing secret, all available in public documents, but undiscussable. Like the idea -- & you can’t contemplate the idea -- that when the US invades another country & the other resists, it’s not the resistors who are committing the crime, it’s the invaders.”
As for international law, Chomsky said it “can work up to the point where the great powers permit it.” Beyond that, it is meaningless. Thus, is international law an illusion if the US picks & chooses -- while exempting itself -- from what is enforced?
“To say that [international law is] dead implies it was ever alive. Has it ever been alive?” he said, citing US stonewalling of the world court’s demand in the 1980s that the US halt its war on Nicaragua & provide extensive reparations for damage done.
“International law cannot be enforced against great powers,” he said. “There’s no enforcement mechanism. Take a look at the International Criminal Court, who has investigated & sentenced African leaders who the US doesn’t like. The major crime of this millennium, certainly, is the US invasion of Iraq. Could that be brought to the international court? I mean, it’s beyond inconceivable.”
Chomsky said the so-called American Dream & US democracy are in “very serious decline,” as social mobility is among the worst among the richest nations. He added that, formally, the US retains a democratic veneer, but actual manifestations of democracy are dwindling.
“Basically, most of the population is disenfranchised,” he said, referring to public polling. “Their representatives pay no attention to their opinion. That’s roughly the lowest three-quarters on the bottom of the income scale. Move up the scale, you get a little more influence. At the top, essentially policy is made. That’s plutocracy, not democracy.”
Millions of Americans don't have enough food. Almost 60,000 Americans are homeless in NYC alone (since 2004). But billions were spent on Iraq & Afghanistan wars. Thousands of American soldiers died. For what? Taliban are back in Afghanistan. Drugs production is back in full force, & actually, even more than Taliban time. Iraq & Syria are completely broken down now. Prominent Americans, e.g. Donald Trump, himself are saying that the world was better off with tyrants like Gaddafi & Saddam than what we have now.
At this point, we can only reiterate that age-old proverb to Americans & Europeans: "you reap what you sow"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Major American media organizations diligently parrot what US officials want the public to know about global affairs, historian Noam Chomsky told RT. To US leaders, any news outlet that “does not repeat the US propaganda system is intolerable,” he said.
The culpability of the West – namely the US – for world affairs, such as the Ukrainian conflict or tensions with Iran, is another idea that is not permissible in leading American media, Chomsky said, adding that world opinion does not matter when that opinion counters US strategy.
“The West means the US & everyone else that goes along,” he said. “What’s called the international community in the US is the US & anyone who happens to be going along with it. Take, say, for example, the question of Iran’s right to carry out its current nuclear policies, whatever they are. The standard line is that the international community objects to this. Who is the international community? What the US determines it to be.”
He added that, “any reader of [George] Orwell would be perfectly familiar with this. But it continues virtually without comment.”
“The most interesting one is the charge that Iran is destabilizing the Middle East because it’s supporting militias which have killed American soldiers in Iraq,” Chomsky told RT’s Alexey Yaroshevsky.
“That’s kind of as if, in 1943, the Nazi press had criticized England because it was destabilizing Europe for supporting partisans who were killing German soldiers. In other words, the assumption is, when the US invades, it kills a couple hundred thousand people, destroys the country, elicits sectarian conflicts that are now tearing Iraq & the region apart, that’s stabilization. If someone resists that tact, that’s destabilization.”
Chomsky also related American media propaganda to recent moves by US President Barack Obama to reach out to Cuba, which the US has long considered a state sponsor of terror while instituting a harsh embargo regime. Chomsky said top American media outlets go to great lengths to pit Cuba -- & not the US -- as the isolated party in the Western Hemisphere.
“The facts are very clear. ... We know what happened. The Kennedy administration launched a very serious terrorist war against Cuba. It was one of the factors that led to the missile crisis. It was a war that was planned to lead to an invasion in October 1962, which Cuba & Russia presumably knew about. It’s now assumed by scholarship that that’s one of the reasons for the placement of the missiles. That war went on for years. No mention of it is permissible [in the US]. The only thing you can mention is that there were some attempts to assassinate [Fidel] Castro. And those can be written off as ridiculous CIA shenanigans. But the terrorist war itself was very serious.”
Obama has changed course on Cuban policy not for reasons pursuant to freedom or democracy, as is peddled in the US media, Chomsky said.
“There is no noble gesture, just Obama’s recognition that the US is practically being thrown out of the hemisphere because of its isolation on this topic,” he added. “But you can’t discuss that [in the US]. It’s all public information, nothing secret, all available in public documents, but undiscussable. Like the idea -- & you can’t contemplate the idea -- that when the US invades another country & the other resists, it’s not the resistors who are committing the crime, it’s the invaders.”
As for international law, Chomsky said it “can work up to the point where the great powers permit it.” Beyond that, it is meaningless. Thus, is international law an illusion if the US picks & chooses -- while exempting itself -- from what is enforced?
“To say that [international law is] dead implies it was ever alive. Has it ever been alive?” he said, citing US stonewalling of the world court’s demand in the 1980s that the US halt its war on Nicaragua & provide extensive reparations for damage done.
“International law cannot be enforced against great powers,” he said. “There’s no enforcement mechanism. Take a look at the International Criminal Court, who has investigated & sentenced African leaders who the US doesn’t like. The major crime of this millennium, certainly, is the US invasion of Iraq. Could that be brought to the international court? I mean, it’s beyond inconceivable.”
Chomsky said the so-called American Dream & US democracy are in “very serious decline,” as social mobility is among the worst among the richest nations. He added that, formally, the US retains a democratic veneer, but actual manifestations of democracy are dwindling.
“Basically, most of the population is disenfranchised,” he said, referring to public polling. “Their representatives pay no attention to their opinion. That’s roughly the lowest three-quarters on the bottom of the income scale. Move up the scale, you get a little more influence. At the top, essentially policy is made. That’s plutocracy, not democracy.”
Saturday, April 18, 2015
How the internet is destroying us
Super loved this article ... left me speechless. Flawless. I tried picking a few lines to put it here, but it seemed every line was more important than the previous one, so I ended up putting here almost the whole article. Ironically, regardless of how much I loved this article, I still gotta use social media.
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The internet, its many evangelists tell us, is the answer to all our problems. It gives power to the people.
It’s a platform for equality that allows everyone an equal share in life’s riches. For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say or buy anything.
But today, as the internet heads towards putting more than half the world’s population online, all this promise has evaporated.
The dream has become a nightmare, in which I fear we billions of network users are victims, not beneficiaries.
In our super-connected 21st-century world, rather than promoting economic fairness, the net is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich & poor, & the hollowing out of the middle classes.
Rather than generating more jobs, it is - as I will explain - a cause of unemployment. Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists such as Google & Amazon in a winner-takes-all economy.
Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency & openness, it secretly gathers information & keeps a watch on each & every one of us.
You need only have read the stories ... about how smart TVs can spy on us in our living rooms to realise that Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a Big Brother society, is becoming a reality.
And thanks to the explosion in social media, rather than creating more democracy, the internet is empowering mob rule.
The internet has also unleashed a seemingly unstoppable flow of increasingly hardcore sexual materials. Only this week it emerged that half a million pornographic images are posted on Twitter every day.
Britain’s most senior judge warned recently that online pornography is a serious danger, fuelling rape & murder. Where will it stop?
And when people are not looking online at other people with no clothes on, they are looking at themselves.
Rather than fostering an intellectual renaissance, the internet has created a selfie-centred culture of voyeurism & narcissism.
Far from making us happy, it is provoking & channelling an outpouring of anger at the world around us.
Of course, the internet is not all bad. It has done tremendous good in connecting families, friends & work colleagues around the world.
The personal lives of 3 billion internet users have been transformed by the incredible convenience of email, social media, e-commerce & mobile apps.
Yes, we all rely on & even love our ever-shrinking & increasingly powerful mobile devices. Yes, the internet can, if used critically, be a source of great enlightenment in terms of the global sharing of ideas & information.
The app economy is already beginning to generate innovative solutions to some of the most pervasive problems on the planet, such as mapping clean water stations in Africa & providing access to credit for entrepreneurs in India.
But the hidden negatives outweigh the positives. Under our noses, one of the biggest ever shifts in power between people & big institutions is taking place, disguised in the language of inclusion & transparency.
Rather than providing a public service, the architects of our digital future are building a society that is a disservice to almost everyone except a few powerful, wealthy owners.
It’s easy to forget the crusading intentions with which the internet revolution began. But then the mantle passed from the techno wizards & visionaries to businessmen.
The internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul. Money replaced all these things.
Amazon reflects much of what has gone wrong. Now by far the dominant internet retailer, it has achieved this position by crushing or acquiring its competitors & selling everything it can lay its hands on.
It has felt the need to expand so ruthlessly because in its type of e-commerce, margins are extremely tight & economies of scale vital. In 2013, Amazon made sales of $75 billion (£49 billion) but returned a profit of just $274 million (£178 million).
To succeed, it has to make itself a virtual monopoly, stifling rivals along the way. Inside the company this is known as the Gazelle Project, after founder Jeff Bezos instructed one of his staff that ‘Amazon should approach small book publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle’.
The book trade - which is where Amazon began - was initially quite enthusiastic about the new arrival but now sees it as a predator as shops close down, unable to compete.
As Amazon expands into more retail sectors - from clothing, electronics & toys to garden furniture & jewellery - it is having the same effect there.
The impact on jobs is huge. While bricks-&-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every £65 million in sales, Amazon employs just 14, making it a job-killer rather than a job-creator.
‘Robotisation’ in its warehouses may reduce job numbers even further, until eventually Amazon eliminates the human factor from shopping completely. The ‘Everything Store’ is becoming the ‘Nobody store’.
Then there is Google, which discovered the holy grail of the information economy with its search engine sifting & indexing the mass of digital material on the worldwide web.
Last year Google processed 40,000 search queries a second, equal to 1.2 trillion searches a year. It controls around two-thirds of searches globally, with 90% dominance in markets such as Italy & Spain.
The service is free to use. Advertising pays the bills & makes the profits.
The irony is that Google was invented by a couple of idealistic computer science graduate students who so mistrusted advertisements that they banned them on their homepage. Now it is by far the largest & most powerful advertising company in history, valued at over £260 billion.
Unlike Amazon, its profits are mind-bogglingly high. In 2013, it returned nearly £10billion for its investors, from revenues of nearly £39billion.
Even more valuable, from Google’s point of view, is what it learns about us. And Google, for better or worse, never forgets. All our digital trails are crunched to provide Google & its corporate clients with our so-called ‘data exhaust’.
From this concept other internet services have developed, including Facebook, Wikipedia, the business networking site LinkedIn, & self-publishing platforms such as Twitter & YouTube.
Most pursue a Google-style strategy of giving away their tools & services free, relying on advertising sales for revenue. In the process, they have created significant wealth for their founders & investors.
On the surface, this seems like a win for everyone. We all get free internet tools & the entrepreneurs become super-rich.
But there is a catch. All of us are, in fact, working for Facebook & Google for nothing, manufacturing the very personal data that makes these companies so valuable.
The result is another massive loss of jobs. Google needs to employ only 46,000 people, compared with an industrial giant like General Motors, which is worth just a seventh of Google’s £260 billion but employs just over 200,000 people in its factories.
For all the claims that the internet has created more equal opportunity & distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a doughnut — with a gaping hole in the middle where millions of workers were once paid to manufacture products.
Take the photo app Instagram, which allows anyone to share their own snaps online for others to see. When it was sold to Facebook for £651 million in 2012, it had just 13 full-time employees. Meanwhile, Kodak was closing 13 factories & 130 photo labs & laying off 47,000 workers.
Or WhatsApp, the instant messaging platform for which Facebook paid £12.4 billion. In one month it handled 54 billion messages from its 450 million users, yet it employs only 55 people to manage its service.
That’s because we are the ones doing most of the work. In this e-world, the quality of the technology is secondary.
What’s important — & what is actually being traded when these companies change hands — is you & me: our labour, our productivity, our network, our supposed creativity.
Yet for our input in adding intelligence to Google, or content to Facebook, we are paid nothing, merely being granted the right to use the software free. And that’s what is driving the new ‘data factory’ economy.
We think we are using Instagram to look at the world, but actually we are the ones being watched. And the more we reveal about ourselves, the more valuable we become to advertisers.
From social media networks such as Twitter & Facebook to Google, ... the exploitation of our personal information is what counts. These companies want to know us so intimately so they can package us up &, without our consent, sell us back to advertisers.
Another great irony in all this is that the internet was created by public-minded technologists such as the English academic Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who were all indifferent to money, sometimes even hostile to it.
Yet the internet they produced with such high humanitarian hopes has triggered one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in human history.
Jeff Bezos has made £19.5 billion from his Amazon Everything Store that offers cheaper prices than its rivals. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated his £19.5 billion by making money out of friendship.
In 25 years, the internet has gone from the initial idealistic banning of all forms of commerce to transforming absolutely everything into profitable activity. Especially our privacy.
Tim Berners-Lee never imagined that his ‘social’ creation to help people to work together more easily could be used so cynically, both by private companies & by governments. Yet that’s what is happening.
As the internet transforms every electronic object into a connected device, we are drifting into a world where everything — our fitness, what we eat, our driving habits, how hard we work — can be profitably quantified by companies such as Google.
Faceless data-gatherers wearing all-seeing electronic glasses watch our every move. Our networked society is like a claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community in which there are no longer any secrets or any anonymity.
We are observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state, from big data companies & the Government to insurance companies, healthcare providers & the police.
Google & Facebook boast that they know us more intimately than we know ourselves. They know what we did yesterday, today &, with the help of predictive technology, what we will do tomorrow.
And it is, frankly, our fault for choosing to live in a crystal republic where cars, mobile phones & televisions — hooked up to the internet — watch us.
Far from being the answer to our problems, the internet, whose pioneers believed it would save humanity, is diminishing our lives.
Instead of creating more transparency, we have devices that make the invisible visible. The sharing economy is really the selfish economy. Social media is, in fact, anti-social. And the success of the internet is a huge failure.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The internet, its many evangelists tell us, is the answer to all our problems. It gives power to the people.
It’s a platform for equality that allows everyone an equal share in life’s riches. For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say or buy anything.
But today, as the internet heads towards putting more than half the world’s population online, all this promise has evaporated.
The dream has become a nightmare, in which I fear we billions of network users are victims, not beneficiaries.
In our super-connected 21st-century world, rather than promoting economic fairness, the net is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich & poor, & the hollowing out of the middle classes.
Rather than generating more jobs, it is - as I will explain - a cause of unemployment. Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists such as Google & Amazon in a winner-takes-all economy.
Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency & openness, it secretly gathers information & keeps a watch on each & every one of us.
You need only have read the stories ... about how smart TVs can spy on us in our living rooms to realise that Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a Big Brother society, is becoming a reality.
And thanks to the explosion in social media, rather than creating more democracy, the internet is empowering mob rule.
The internet has also unleashed a seemingly unstoppable flow of increasingly hardcore sexual materials. Only this week it emerged that half a million pornographic images are posted on Twitter every day.
Britain’s most senior judge warned recently that online pornography is a serious danger, fuelling rape & murder. Where will it stop?
And when people are not looking online at other people with no clothes on, they are looking at themselves.
Rather than fostering an intellectual renaissance, the internet has created a selfie-centred culture of voyeurism & narcissism.
Far from making us happy, it is provoking & channelling an outpouring of anger at the world around us.
Of course, the internet is not all bad. It has done tremendous good in connecting families, friends & work colleagues around the world.
The personal lives of 3 billion internet users have been transformed by the incredible convenience of email, social media, e-commerce & mobile apps.
Yes, we all rely on & even love our ever-shrinking & increasingly powerful mobile devices. Yes, the internet can, if used critically, be a source of great enlightenment in terms of the global sharing of ideas & information.
The app economy is already beginning to generate innovative solutions to some of the most pervasive problems on the planet, such as mapping clean water stations in Africa & providing access to credit for entrepreneurs in India.
But the hidden negatives outweigh the positives. Under our noses, one of the biggest ever shifts in power between people & big institutions is taking place, disguised in the language of inclusion & transparency.
Rather than providing a public service, the architects of our digital future are building a society that is a disservice to almost everyone except a few powerful, wealthy owners.
It’s easy to forget the crusading intentions with which the internet revolution began. But then the mantle passed from the techno wizards & visionaries to businessmen.
The internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul. Money replaced all these things.
Amazon reflects much of what has gone wrong. Now by far the dominant internet retailer, it has achieved this position by crushing or acquiring its competitors & selling everything it can lay its hands on.
It has felt the need to expand so ruthlessly because in its type of e-commerce, margins are extremely tight & economies of scale vital. In 2013, Amazon made sales of $75 billion (£49 billion) but returned a profit of just $274 million (£178 million).
To succeed, it has to make itself a virtual monopoly, stifling rivals along the way. Inside the company this is known as the Gazelle Project, after founder Jeff Bezos instructed one of his staff that ‘Amazon should approach small book publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle’.
The book trade - which is where Amazon began - was initially quite enthusiastic about the new arrival but now sees it as a predator as shops close down, unable to compete.
As Amazon expands into more retail sectors - from clothing, electronics & toys to garden furniture & jewellery - it is having the same effect there.
The impact on jobs is huge. While bricks-&-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every £65 million in sales, Amazon employs just 14, making it a job-killer rather than a job-creator.
‘Robotisation’ in its warehouses may reduce job numbers even further, until eventually Amazon eliminates the human factor from shopping completely. The ‘Everything Store’ is becoming the ‘Nobody store’.
Then there is Google, which discovered the holy grail of the information economy with its search engine sifting & indexing the mass of digital material on the worldwide web.
Last year Google processed 40,000 search queries a second, equal to 1.2 trillion searches a year. It controls around two-thirds of searches globally, with 90% dominance in markets such as Italy & Spain.
The service is free to use. Advertising pays the bills & makes the profits.
The irony is that Google was invented by a couple of idealistic computer science graduate students who so mistrusted advertisements that they banned them on their homepage. Now it is by far the largest & most powerful advertising company in history, valued at over £260 billion.
Unlike Amazon, its profits are mind-bogglingly high. In 2013, it returned nearly £10billion for its investors, from revenues of nearly £39billion.
Even more valuable, from Google’s point of view, is what it learns about us. And Google, for better or worse, never forgets. All our digital trails are crunched to provide Google & its corporate clients with our so-called ‘data exhaust’.
From this concept other internet services have developed, including Facebook, Wikipedia, the business networking site LinkedIn, & self-publishing platforms such as Twitter & YouTube.
Most pursue a Google-style strategy of giving away their tools & services free, relying on advertising sales for revenue. In the process, they have created significant wealth for their founders & investors.
On the surface, this seems like a win for everyone. We all get free internet tools & the entrepreneurs become super-rich.
But there is a catch. All of us are, in fact, working for Facebook & Google for nothing, manufacturing the very personal data that makes these companies so valuable.
The result is another massive loss of jobs. Google needs to employ only 46,000 people, compared with an industrial giant like General Motors, which is worth just a seventh of Google’s £260 billion but employs just over 200,000 people in its factories.
For all the claims that the internet has created more equal opportunity & distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a doughnut — with a gaping hole in the middle where millions of workers were once paid to manufacture products.
Take the photo app Instagram, which allows anyone to share their own snaps online for others to see. When it was sold to Facebook for £651 million in 2012, it had just 13 full-time employees. Meanwhile, Kodak was closing 13 factories & 130 photo labs & laying off 47,000 workers.
Or WhatsApp, the instant messaging platform for which Facebook paid £12.4 billion. In one month it handled 54 billion messages from its 450 million users, yet it employs only 55 people to manage its service.
That’s because we are the ones doing most of the work. In this e-world, the quality of the technology is secondary.
What’s important — & what is actually being traded when these companies change hands — is you & me: our labour, our productivity, our network, our supposed creativity.
Yet for our input in adding intelligence to Google, or content to Facebook, we are paid nothing, merely being granted the right to use the software free. And that’s what is driving the new ‘data factory’ economy.
We think we are using Instagram to look at the world, but actually we are the ones being watched. And the more we reveal about ourselves, the more valuable we become to advertisers.
From social media networks such as Twitter & Facebook to Google, ... the exploitation of our personal information is what counts. These companies want to know us so intimately so they can package us up &, without our consent, sell us back to advertisers.
Another great irony in all this is that the internet was created by public-minded technologists such as the English academic Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who were all indifferent to money, sometimes even hostile to it.
Yet the internet they produced with such high humanitarian hopes has triggered one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in human history.
Jeff Bezos has made £19.5 billion from his Amazon Everything Store that offers cheaper prices than its rivals. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated his £19.5 billion by making money out of friendship.
In 25 years, the internet has gone from the initial idealistic banning of all forms of commerce to transforming absolutely everything into profitable activity. Especially our privacy.
Tim Berners-Lee never imagined that his ‘social’ creation to help people to work together more easily could be used so cynically, both by private companies & by governments. Yet that’s what is happening.
As the internet transforms every electronic object into a connected device, we are drifting into a world where everything — our fitness, what we eat, our driving habits, how hard we work — can be profitably quantified by companies such as Google.
Faceless data-gatherers wearing all-seeing electronic glasses watch our every move. Our networked society is like a claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community in which there are no longer any secrets or any anonymity.
We are observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state, from big data companies & the Government to insurance companies, healthcare providers & the police.
Google & Facebook boast that they know us more intimately than we know ourselves. They know what we did yesterday, today &, with the help of predictive technology, what we will do tomorrow.
And it is, frankly, our fault for choosing to live in a crystal republic where cars, mobile phones & televisions — hooked up to the internet — watch us.
Far from being the answer to our problems, the internet, whose pioneers believed it would save humanity, is diminishing our lives.
Instead of creating more transparency, we have devices that make the invisible visible. The sharing economy is really the selfish economy. Social media is, in fact, anti-social. And the success of the internet is a huge failure.
Monday, January 5, 2015
Society & Truth
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| This is the problem what the world is currently going through ... people who speak the truth are marginalized |
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