On plants and modernity
By - Darren Fleet
I thrust my hand into the dark earth …

and curl my fingers into a loose fist around a clump of soil. The rays of sun above me filter through the coverage of a heritage magnolia tree, its canopy blocking half of the potato bed below. In the wet days of spring the magnolia’s clumpy red roses, the size of tennis balls, blanketed the backyard for weeks. I’ve spent hours, if not days in total, tolerating this one tree alone, religiously clearing the wilting red petals while tiptoeing around the young seedlings the tree attempted to smother at my feet. Now that it’s July, the buds are mostly gone and the green foliage is thick along the scraggly chocolate-brown limbs. The light is still diffused in the branches, but the potatoes don’t seem to mind — their water-saturated stalks, with fuzzy green leaves, are two feet tall now. Months ago, my neighbor attempted to convince me to cut the magnolia down to save all of this extra work. I told him I wasn’t about to cut down a fifty-year-old tree for the sheer inconvenience of sweeping flowers — and now that I know how long it takes to grow one simple seed into a real edible thing, how could I? If there is a Zen to gardening it is this simple fact: it’s not about the food, it’s not about the politics, it’s not about the greater good, the health or the DIY collectives; it’s about recovering a piece of irrationality, living beyond the efficiency at the core of our civilization’s malaise.

Gardening is kind of a lame word. It invites images of leisurely grandmothers, flower print gloves and poor weekend fashion sense. And urban farming, though more correctly descriptive, doesn’t seem to capture what I see happening in the yards and community garden plots around my neighborhood. Urban farming is a subversive activity, but only when it crosses the threshold from pastime to lifestyle. When that happens, something in you changes. Like the religious experiences of youth or the rapture of love, suddenly an entire realm of imagination opens up. You begin to pay more attention to the wind, the temperature and the sunshine. Everything becomes relational to the growing seeds, away from the ego, away from the self, away from the paradigm that puts you at the center of everything worthwhile. You start moving slower through the streets, eyeing scrap wood in the alleyways for potential plant beds. You examine rogue wild flowers for clippings. You tear apart scavenged pallets with an old claw hammer for boards to make a planter; you straighten out rusty bent nails to fasten it together even though one-and-a-half-inch spikes are a dollar a dozen at the Home Depot down the road. Rainy days become more bearable. The burning ball of fire in the sky has more meaning. You scorn the glass towers and give cheers to wild lawns and old houses deteriorating under the pressure of nature and time. You pay mournful homage to the sad irony that the best farmland in the world is now under concrete.

When I was a smoker, logic told me that that $8.00 for a pack of cigarettes was a good deal and $3.00 for a fistful of organic fair trade kale was a rip-off. This is the type of reasoning that happens when market mechanisms of value disable one’s ability to make sound physiological decisions — when the cost of a thing (exchange value) becomes the price tag on the thing, and not the thing itself (use value). The distorted process that leads to deadly price points between carcinogens and vegetables is alive in the mental environment as well. In the same way the market teaches us to value pesticides over blemishes, packaging over content and teeth-rotting sodas over water, modernity teaches us to value urban over rural, machines over minds, individuality over community and growth over contentment. This psychosis affects the fabric of our dreams, the careers we aspire to and the way we conceive of the land in our culture and our economy and its relation to ourselves. Accordingly, two of the saddest intuitive lessons we learn growing up in this part of the world are that food has no worth and that meals have no purpose other than sustenance. Today, food, even organic food, is expected to be cheap. Not surprisingly, North American food costs are the cheapest on the planet. Single serving dinners and fast-food restaurants dominate the eating culture. Agricultural workers are the lowest-paid workers throughout the vast continental food chain.

Even those who have nostalgic ideas about what it means to farm don’t really want to be farmers. When was the last time you met someone who actually wanted to grow corn, beets, beans or pumpkins? Have you ever met a college dropout in Toronto or New York or London who moved to the bald Canadian prairies to reap canola? And if you did, what did you honestly think of their aspirations? Were they lowbrow? Were they selling themselves short? Were they limiting their unique individual potential? Who among you wants to be up from dawn to dusk, at the mercy of earth’s natural systems, living on faith amongst secular technologies, covered in mud all the time, no time for art, music or self-expression? These questions might be rude, but they’re essential to ask in order to get to the heart of the contradictory relationship we have with farming in the modern age — it’s the most basic building block of our existence, but it isn’t valued.

Aspiring to be “only” a farmer, to work the land, has been the bane of modernity’s existence since development theorists first began spinning tales of how to get to the future. When exposed to the glitz of modernity, most people desperately try to escape the fields, leaving only Monsanto in the countryside. The mass-migrations to mega slum cities in sub-Saharan Africa, India and Latin America are a testament to the continuous pull of “opportunity.” As Daniel Quinn argues, even the earliest folks tales of Western civilization, like the Bible’s Cain and Abel, pit the entrepreneurial proto-urbanite against the satisfied herdsman, the latter murdered by his forward-looking bother — our first modern superstar. Modern humankind is urban. Nature is a place to visit. Reading early development texts like Daniel Lerner’s 1958 The Passing of Traditional Society, you learn that working the land, the primary occupation in “traditional society,” is to economic progress what religion once was to the enlightenment — backward, irrational, unimaginative, slow, old:

Traditional society is non-participant — it deploys people by kinship into communities isolated from each other and from a center; without an urban-rural division of labor, it develops few needs requiring economic interdependence; lacking the bonds of interdependence, people’s horizons are limited by locale and their decisions involve only other known people in known institutions.

Today in the industrialized world, with the exception of a fraction of the agricultural economy, there are no more farms, only factories. And communities are defined as groups of individuals, a hopeful oxymoron at best. The impact of this detachment from our agrarian roots is as ecological and social as it is psychological. Removed from our billions-of-years-old evolutionary environment in a matter of a few millennia (and in some cases centuries and even decades), the loss of natural interaction has turned into a banal impulse to destroy — that is, as ecologist Bill Rees says, to turn everything around us into ourselves. In religious terms, you could say we’ve gained the world but lost our souls. In secular terms, we’ve reached modernity, but lost our minds. Mental health is now the most debilitating medical condition in the United States, responsible for more lost work hours than any other affliction. Not far behind are the complications related to overeating — diabetes, heart failure, cancer, etc. Just a few months ago the FDA approved an “obesity pill,” a last-ditch attempt to tackle America’s 35% obesity rate. When we moved from the fields we stopped creating living things. This has affected us in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Our materiality is without a pulse. We spend most of our time killing and working with the dead. Our greatest minds cannot be satisfied with natural mysteries. In this paradigm, trees become paper, houses and fences. Fields become streets and parking lots. Minerals become steel and computers. Waterways become highways and trash bins. Animals and plants become food, fuel and commodities. The natural world has no intrinsic value other than efficiency, and the most efficient use invented so far is to mulch it into something else. And now we are waking up to the reality that our proudest human achievement, modernity, could be an evolutionary dead end. Without the ability or desire to go backward to some pre-modern utopia, how do we go forward without killing ourselves?

I did my first inner-city garden story in Vancouver in 2008 as part of a group assignment during journalism school. When someone suggested “Green Revolution” as a title, I wanted to gag. A quarter-acre of green space in a city of ever-increasing high-rises hardly qualifies as the coming environmental insurrection — and if it does we all really do have a lot to worry about. If there’s a revolution happening in this plot it certainly isn’t green, I said. Urban gardening, city farming, is not about food at all; it’s about recovering people. It’s about our psychological link to the land, where all issues from social inequality to food security to environmentalism converge. Every one of us has a psychological heritage choking under the veneer of modernity. The instinct that makes you nervous to fly 30,000 feet in the air in a metal tube is the same instinct that desperately searches for meaning without finding it in iPods, addictions, televisions, cars, financial careers, electronic stimulation, endless consumption and hyper-rationality. Like the altruistic goodness that is unleashed in the wake of tragedy, turning enemies into brothers and sisters, and nations into allies, a simple crack of the earth can turn a once-dead biomass into a thriving stalk of singularity. As we filmed the first dirt being shoveled for the assignment that day, something unexpected happened. Neighborhood addicts, sex workers, police officers, social workers and other curious bystanders flocked to the gates as if they were seeing something for the very first time. Who among them could recall the last time they had thrust their naked hands into the earth and didn’t rush to the tap to wash it off? Who could remember the last time they felt the intoxicating spell of splitting the ground?

I put the dirt in my hand down and mound it up against the side of a rainbow chard that’s been knocked over by the wind. This early in the season, some plants grow too fast and topple under their own weight. I stand it up and use a twist-tie from a loaf of bread to fasten it to a busted broomstick handle I found in the alley. Each morning after a windstorm some plant needs fixing. I know that what I grow in this plot isn’t going to last the coming winter. It might not even last past November. But that doesn’t matter. Urban gardening isn’t about the yield. It’s not about beating the factory-farm system or the rotten financial apparatus that is defining our generation. Instead, it’s about living beyond the systems that shape us. It’s about action. It’s about spark. It’s about creation. It’s about recovering the self. For many of us, planting a seed and caring for it until fruition will be the first time in our lives that we give life instead of taking it, that we create food instead of just consuming it. When you pull your hands out of your wallet and put them into the earth, for a minute, for an hour, for days at a time, when you hover over a seedling for weeks on end wondering if it’s ever going to grow its legs, you’re no longer complying with modernity.

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/103/plants-and-modernity.html

Monday, 03 November 2014 10:25 By Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27201-the-leading-terrorist-state?tmpl=component&print=1

 (Image: USA flag via Shutterstock; Edited: JR/TO)


"It's official: The U.S. is the world's leading terrorist state, and proud of it."

That should have been the headline for the lead story in The New York Times on Oct. 15, which was more politely titled "CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels."
 
The article reports on a CIA review of recent U.S. covert operations to determine their effectiveness. The White House concluded that unfortunately successes were so rare that some rethinking of the policy was in order.

The article quoted President Barack Obama as saying that he had asked the CIA to conduct the review to find cases of "financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn't come up with much." So Obama has some reluctance about continuing such efforts.
 
The first paragraph of the Times article cites three major examples of "covert aid": Angola, Nicaragua and Cuba. In fact, each case was a major terrorist operation conducted by the U.S.  

Angola was invaded by South Africa, which, according to Washington, was defending itself from one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups" - Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. That was 1988.  

By then the Reagan administration was virtually alone in its support for the apartheid regime, even violating congressional sanctions to increase trade with its South African ally.  

Meanwhile Washington joined South Africa in providing crucial support for Jonas Savimbi's terrorist Unita army in Angola. Washington continued to do so even after Savimbi had been roundly defeated in a carefully monitored free election, and South Africa had withdrawn its support. Savimbi was a "monster whose lust for power had brought appalling misery to his people," in the words of Marrack Goulding, British ambassador to Angola.  

The consequences were horrendous. A 1989 U.N. inquiry estimated that South African depredations led to 1.5 million deaths in neighboring countries, let alone what was happening within South Africa itself. Cuban forces finally beat back the South African aggressors and compelled them to withdraw from illegally occupied Namibia. The U.S. alone continued to support the monster Savimbi.  

In Cuba, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched a murderous and destructive campaign to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba - the words of Kennedy's close associate, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his semiofficial biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for the terrorist war.  

The atrocities against Cuba were severe. The plans were for the terrorism to culminate in an uprising in October 1962, which would lead to a U.S. invasion. By now, scholarship recognizes that this was one reason why Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba, initiating a crisis that came perilously close to nuclear war. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later conceded that if he had been a Cuban leader, he "might have expected a U.S. invasion."  

American terrorist attacks against Cuba continued for more than 30 years. The cost to Cubans was of course harsh. The accounts of the victims, hardly ever heard in the U.S., were reported in detail for the first time in a study by Canadian scholar Keith Bolender, "Voices From the Other Side: an Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba," in 2010.  

The toll of the long terrorist war was amplified by a crushing embargo, which continues even today in defiance of the world. On Oct. 28, the U.N., for the 23rd time, endorsed "the necessity of ending the economic, commercial, financial blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba." The vote was 188 to 2 (U.S., Israel), with three U.S. Pacific Island dependencies abstaining.  

There is by now some opposition to the embargo in high places in the U.S., reports ABC News, because "it is no longer useful" (citing Hillary Clinton's new book "Hard Choices"). French scholar Salim Lamrani reviews the bitter costs to Cubans in his 2013 book "The Economic War Against Cuba."  

Nicaragua need hardly be mentioned. President Ronald Reagan's terrorist war was condemned by the World Court, which ordered the U.S. to terminate its "unlawful use of force" and to pay substantial reparations.  

Washington responded by escalating the war and vetoing a 1986 U.N. Security Council resolution calling on all states - meaning the U.S. - to observe international law.  

Another example of terrorism will be commemorated on Nov. 16, the 25th anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador by a terrorist unit of the Salvadoran army, armed and trained by the U.S. On the orders of the military high command, the soldiers broke into the Jesuit university to murder the priests and any witnesses - including their housekeeper and her daughter.  

This event culminated the U.S. terrorist wars in Central America in the 1980s, though the effects are still on the front pages today in the reports of "illegal immigrants," fleeing in no small measure from the consequences of that carnage, and being deported from the U.S. to survive, if they can, in the ruins of their home countries.  

Washington has also emerged as the world champion in generating terror. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar warns of the "resentment-generating impact of the U.S. strikes" in Syria, which may further induce the jihadi organizations Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State toward "repairing their breach from last year and campaigning in tandem against the U.S. intervention by portraying it as a war against Islam."  

That is by now a familiar consequence of U.S. operations that have helped to spread jihadism from a corner of Afghanistan to a large part of the world.  

Jihadism's most fearsome current manifestation is the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has established its murderous caliphate in large areas of Iraq and Syria.  

"I think the United States is one of the key creators of this organization," reports former CIA analyst Graham Fuller, a prominent commentator on the region. "The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS," he adds, "but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the War in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS."  

To this we may add the world's greatest terrorist campaign: Obama's global project of assassination of "terrorists." The "resentment-generating impact" of those drone and special-forces strikes should be too well known to require further comment.  

This is a record to be contemplated with some awe.  

© 2014 Noam Chomsky

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_coming_climate_revolt_20140921/

The Coming Climate Revolt  
By Chris  Hedges
Posted on Sep 21, 2014
 
More than 100,000 people march through midtown Manhattan as part of the People’s Climate March on
Sunday in New York. John Minchillo/AP Images for AVAAZ



Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The
Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?”The other panelists were Bill McKibben, Naomi
Klein, Kshama Sawant and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The event, moderated by Brian
Lehrer, occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City. For
a video of some of what the panelists said, click here. 
 
We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a
corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy
endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and
incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the
senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph
Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health
Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with
labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated
military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been
lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to
transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this
is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major
social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.

We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” By this Wolin
means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to
electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a
free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has
in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.

The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of
economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified
liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of
liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton
administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get
corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion
of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the
FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of
FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform that had protected our banking system from
speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the
Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It
forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane. 
 
By the time Clinton was done the rhetoric of self-professed liberals was a public relations game.
This is why there is continuity from the Bush administration to the Obama
administration. Obama’s election did nothing to halt the expanding assault on
civil liberties—in fact Obama’s assault has been worse—the Bush bailouts of big
banks, the endless imperial wars, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the
hiring of corporate lobbyists to write legislation and serve in top government
positions, the explosion of drilling and fracking, the security and surveillance
state as well as the persecution of government whistle-blowers. 

This audience is well aware of the Democratic Party’s squalid record on the environment, laid out
in detail in a new Greenpeace report written by Charlie Cray and Peter Montague,
titled “The Kingpins of Carbon and Their War on Democracy.” The report
chronicles what it calls “a multi-decade war on democracy by the kingpins of
carbon—the coal, the oil, and gas industries allied with a handful of
self-interested libertarian billionaires.” 

The Obama administration, in return for financial support from these kingpins of carbon,
has cynically undermined international climate treaties, a fact we discovered
only because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. It
uses its intelligence agencies, these revelations revealed, to spy on those
carrying out climate negotiations to thwart caps on carbon emissions and push
through useless, nonbinding agreements. The Obama administration has overseen a
massive expansion of fracking. It is pushing through a series of trade
agreements such as the TPP and the TAFTA that will increase fracking along with
expanding our exports of coal, oil and gas. It authorized the excavation of tar
sands in Utah and Alabama. It approved the southern half of the Keystone
pipeline. It has permitted seismic testing for offshore drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico, the East Coast and in parts of Alaska, a process that kills off hundreds
of sea mammals. It authorized drilling within four miles of the Florida
coastline, violating one of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. This expansion of
offshore drilling reversed 20 years of federal policy. 

If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to
carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole. And this
is what the corporate state seeks. It seeks to perpetuate the facade of
democracy. It seeks to make us believe what is no longer real, that if we work
within the system we can reform it. And it has put in place a terrifying
superstructure to silence all who step outside the narrow parameters it defines as acceptable.


The Democratic Party speaks to us“rationally.” The party says it seeks to protect civil liberties,
regulate Wall Street, is concerned about the plight of the working class and
wants to institute reforms to address climate change. But in all these areas,
and many more, it has, like its Republican counterpart, repeatedly sold out the
citizenry for corporate power and corporate profits—in much the same manner
that Big Green environmental groups such as the Climate Group and the
Environmental Defense Fund have sold out the environmental movement. 
 
To assume that Obama, or the Democratic Party, because they acknowledge the reality of climate
change, while the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party does not, is better
equipped to deal with the crisis is incorrect. Republicans appeal to one
constituency. The Democrats appeal to another. But both parties will do nothing
to halt the ravaging of the planet.

If Wolin is right, and I believe he is, then when we begin to build mass movements that carry out
repeated acts of civil disobedience, as I think everyone on this panel believes
we must do, the corporate state, including the Democratic Party, will react the
way all calcified states react. It will use the security and surveillance
apparatus, militarized police forces—and, under Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act, the military itself—to shut down all dissent with
force. The legal and organizational mechanisms are now in place to, with the
flip of a switch, put the nation effectively under martial law. When acts of
mass civil disobedience begin on Monday morning with Flood Wall Street and later
with Occupy the U.N., the face of the corporate state will, as it did during the
Occupy movement, reveal itself. 
 
If the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform then our strategy and our
tactics must be different. We will have to cease our appealing to the system. We
will have to view the state, including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to
genuine reform. We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution. We will
have to carry out acts of civil disobedience that seek to cripple the mechanisms
of corporate power. The corporate elites, blinded by their lust for profit and
foolish enough to believe they can protect themselves from climate change, will
not veer from our path towards ecocide unless they are forced from power. And
this means the beginning of a titanic clash between our corporate masters and ourselves. 
  .

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_socrates_20140615/

Posted on Jun 15, 2014
By Chris Hedges
 
Noam Chomsky speaks to the media at a friend’s house in Amman, Jordan, in 2010. AP/Nader Daoud 

  
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the
United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass
propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings
of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite
to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in
the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious
independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media
and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates
of our time.
 
We live in a bleak moment in human history. And Chomsky begins from this reality. He quoted the
late Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century who argued
that we probably will never encounter intelligent extraterrestrials because
higher life forms render themselves extinct in a relatively short time. 
  
“Mayr argued that the adaptive value of what is called ‘higher intelligence’ is very low,” Chomsky
said. “Beetles and bacteria are much more adaptive than humans. We will find out
if it is better to be smart than stupid. We may be a biological error, using the
100,000 years which Mayr gives [as] the life expectancy of a species to destroy
ourselves and many other life forms on the planet.”  

Climate change “may doom us all, and not in the distant future,” Chomsky said. “It may overwhelm
everything. This is the first time in human history that we have the capacity to
destroy the conditions for decent survival. It is already happening. Look at
species destruction. It is estimated to be at about the level of 65 million
years ago when an asteroid hit the earth, ended the period of the dinosaurs and
wiped out a huge number of species. It is the same level today. And we are the
asteroid. If anyone could see us from outer space they would be astonished.
There are sectors of the global population trying to impede the global
catastrophe. There are other sectors trying to accelerate it. Take a look at
whom they are. Those who are trying to impede it are the ones we call backward,
indigenous populations—the First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in
Australia, the tribal people in India. Who is accelerating it? The most
privileged, so-called advanced, educated populations of the world.”  
 
If Mayr was right, we are at the tail end of a binge, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution,
that is about to drive us over a cliff environmentally and economically. A
looming breakdown, in Chomsky’s eyes, offers us opportunity as well as danger.
He has warned repeatedly that if we are to adapt and survive we must overthrow
the corporate power elite through mass movements and return power to autonomous
collectives that are focused on sustaining communities rather than exploiting
them. Appealing to the established institutions and mechanisms of power will not work. 
 
“We can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution,” he said.
“The Industrial Revolution took off right around here in eastern Massachusetts
in the mid-19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being
driven into the industrial system. Men and women—women left the farms to be
‘factory girls’—bitterly resented it. This was also a period of a very free
press, the freest in the history of the country. There were a wide variety of
journals. When you read them they are 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 being forced into what
they called ‘wage labor,’ which they regarded as not very different from chattel
slavery. In fact this was such a popular mood it was a slogan of the Republican
Party—‘The only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that
working for the wage is supposed to be temporary.’
 
Chomsky said this shift, which forced agrarian workers off the land into the factories in urban
centers, was accompanied by a destruction of culture. Laborers, he said, had
once been part of the “high culture of the day.” 
  
“I remember this as late as the 1930s with my own family,” he said. “This was being taken away from
us. We were being forced to become something like slaves. They argued that if
you were a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell a product that you produce,
then as a wage earner what you are doing is selling yourself. And this was
deeply offensive. They condemned what they called ‘the new spirit of the age,’
‘gaining wealth and forgetting all but self.’ This sounds familiar.”
 
It is this radical consciousness, which took root in the mid-19th century among farmers and many
factory workers, that Chomsky says we must recover if we are to move forward as
a society and a civilization. In the late 19th century farmers, especially in
the Midwest, freed themselves from the bankers and capital markets by forming
their own banks and co-operatives. They understood the danger of falling victim
to a vicious debt peonage run by the capitalist class. The radical farmers made
alliances with the Knights of Labor, which believed that those who worked in
the mills should own them.
 
“By the 1890s workers were taking over towns and running them in eastern and western
Pennsylvania, such as Homestead,”Chomsky said. “But they were crushed by force.
It took some time. The final blow was Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare.”
 
“The idea should still be that of the Knights of Labor,” he said. “Those who work in the mills
should own them. There is plenty of manufacturing going on. There will be more.
Energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive
exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren. But
under the capitalist morality the calculus is profits tomorrow outweigh the
existence of your grandchildren. We are getting lower energy prices. They
[business leaders] are enthusiastic that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe
because we have lower energy prices. And we can undermine European efforts at
developing sustainable energy.” 
 
Chomsky hopes that those who work in the service industry and in manufacturing can organize to
begin to take control of their workplaces. He notes that in the Rust Belt,
including in states such as Ohio, there is a growth of worker-owned enterprises.
 
The rise of powerful populist movements in the early 20th century meant that the business class could
no longer keep workers subjugated purely through violence. Business interests
had to build systems of mass propaganda to control opinions and attitudes. The
rise of the public relations industry, initiated by President Wilson’s Committee
on Public Information to instill a pro-war sentiment in the population, ushered
in an era of not only permanent war but also permanent propaganda. Consumption
was instilled as an inner compulsion. The cult of the self became paramount. And
opinions and attitudes, as they are today, were crafted and shaped by the centers of power.
 
“A pacifist population was driven to become war-mongering fanatics,” Chomsky said. “It was
this experience that led the power elite to discover that through effective
propaganda they could, as Walter Lippmann wrote, employ “a new art in democracy,
manufacturing consent.’ ”
 
Democracy was eviscerated. Citizens became spectators rather than participants in power. The
few intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, who maintained their independence
and who refused to serve the power elite were pushed out of the mainstream, as
Chomsky has been. 
 
“Most of the intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause,”
Chomsky said of the First World War. “There were only a few fringe dissenters.
Bertrand Russell went to jail. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed.
Randolph Bourne was marginalized. Eugene Debs was in jail. They dared to
question the magnificence of the war.”
 
This war hysteria has never ceased, moving seamlessly from a fear of the German Hun to a fear of
communists to a fear of Islamic jihadists and terrorists.
 
“The public is frightened into believing we have to defend ourselves,” Chomsky said. “This is
not entirely false. The military system generates forces that will be harmful to
us. Take Obama’s terrorist drone campaign, the biggest terrorist campaign in
history. This program generates potential terrorists faster than it destroys
suspects. You can see it now in Iraq. Go back to the Nuremburg judgments.
Aggression was defined as the supreme international crime. It differed from
other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows. The U.S. and
British invasion of Iraq is a textbook case of aggression. By the standards of
Nuremberg they [the British and U.S. leaders] would all be hanged. And one of
the crimes they committed was to ignite the Sunni and Shiite conflict.”
 
The conflict, which is now enflaming the region, is “a U.S. crime if we believe the validity of the
judgments against the Nazis. Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at the
[Nuremberg] tribunal, addressed the tribunal. He pointed out that we were giving
these defendants a poisoned chalice. He said that if we ever sipped from it we
had to be treated the same way or else the whole thing is a farce.”  
  
Today’s elite schools and universities inculcate into their students the worldview endorsed by
the power elite. They train students to be deferential to authority. Chomsky
calls education at most of these schools, including Harvard, a few blocks away
from MIT, “a deep indoctrination system.” 
  
“There is the understanding that there are certain things you do not say and do not think,”
Chomsky said. “This is very broad among the educated classes. It is why they
overwhelmingly support state power and state violence, with some qualifications.
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 a Nazi
general who thought the second front was a strategic blunder. That’s what we call criticism.”
 
And yet, Chomsky does not discount a resurgent populism.
 
“In the 1920s the labor movement had been practically destroyed,” he said. “This had been a very
militant labor movement. In the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of
popular activism. There were circumstances [the Great Depression] that led to
the opportunity to do something. We are living with that constantly. Take the
last 30 years. For a majority of the population it has been stagnation or worse.
It is not the deep Depression, but it is a semi-permanent depression for most of
the population. There is plenty of kindling out there that can be lighted.” 
  
Chomsky believes that the propaganda used to manufacture consent, even in the age of digital
media, is losing its effectiveness as our reality bears less and less
resemblance to the portrayal of reality by the organs of mass media. While state
propaganda can still “drive the population into terror and fear and war
hysteria, as we saw before the invasion of Iraq,” it is failing to maintain an
unquestioned faith in the systems of power. Chomsky credits the Occupy movement,
which he describes as a tactic, with “lighting a spark” and, most important,
“breaking through the atomization of society.” 
  
“There are all sorts of efforts to separate people from one another,” he said. “The ideal social unit
[in the world of state propagandists] is you and your television screen. The
Occupy actions brought that down for a large part of the population. People
recognized that we could get together and do things for ourselves. We can have a
common kitchen. We can have a place for public discourse. We can form our ideas.
We can do something. This is an important attack on the core of the means by
which the public is controlled. You are not just an individual trying to
maximize consumption. You find there are other concerns in life. If those
attitudes and associations can be sustained and move in new directions, that
will be important.”