Spent the larger part of the day on a bus to and fro Ottawa. Skies are blue; rivers frozen; and Canada is flat, flat, flat. Another hour in the Ismaili Imamat Embassy being interviewed by Aga Khan Canada. I am exhausted. In between, I spent the bus ride reading Chomsky’s book “Imperial Ambitions.” A breath of fresh air in the realm of paranoid, uber-complicated academics. I’ve taken out some of my favorite, most relevant bits:
As Chomsky says, the US has consistently demonized those they are threatening. In other words,
As Franklin points out, it’s consistently the case that the people who are about to exterminate us are the ones who are under our boot. We’ve got our boot on their necks, and that means they’re about to exterminate us (p. 165).
This type of genocidal rhetoric seems more familiar to Milosevic’s Serbia, less so the U.S.A. Viva La Vida.
Lyndon Johnson said plaintively, “There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them. We are outnumbered fifteen to one. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.” That is a constant refrain of imperialism. You have your jackboot on someone’s neck and they’re about to destroy you … The same is true with any form of oppression. And it’s psychologically understandable. If you’re crushing and destroying someone, you have to have a reason for it, and it can’t be, I’m a murderous monster. It has to be self-defense. I’m protecting myself against them. Look what they’re doing to me. Oppression gets psychologically inverted: the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself. (p. 167).
A few other highlights, this one mentioned the ridicule behind hyper-religious America:
The teaching of evolution, which is just normal in every other country, is extremely difficult here. And it has been for a long time. I remember when my wife was in college in the late 1940s. She was taking a sociology course, and I remember her telling me that the instructor said, “The next section is going to be on evolution. You don’t have to believe this, but you just ought to know what some people think (p. 186).
And last, but not least, a thunderous statement, inverting our ‘traditional’ knowledge of failed state:
The United States is basically what’s called a “failed state.” It was formal democratic institutions, but they barely function. So it doesn’t matter that approximately three fourths of the population think we ought to have some kind of government-funded health care system. It doesn’t even matter if a large majority regards health care as a moral value. When commentators rave about moral values, they are talking about banning gay marriage, not the idea that everyone should have decent health care. (p. 198).
And then, though it’s hard to stick to this truth with all that’s around,
Many of the basic institutions of our society are totally illegitimate. Do corporations have to be controlled by management and owners and dedicated to the welfare of shareholders instead of being controlled by the people who work in them and dedicated to the community and the workers? It’s not a law of nature (p. 201).