When Urban Myths are true...
Last week, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez arrived at the United Nations with his colorful rhetoric and a dog-eared copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival" frimly gripped in his hand. He praised the book effusively to the UN General Assembly and recommended that all Americans read it. Within a few days, "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" had soared from 39,000th on the Bestsellers list to #1! [details]
Chavez weaves magical realism, diabology, geopolitics, prophesy, book-plugging and dark humor into his recent UN Speech:
For more information on Noam Chomsky's political theory and ideas, watch this interview on www.limbovision.org
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14 comments:
"Smell the Sulfur" catchy slogan
interesting blog btw
Good to see you're still bloggin'.
China Jerry
Jerry!
So good to hear from you! I hope you are well.You are much missed by your former crew here in NC. Were you able to view the videos? Email me details on your life in China.
VL
Noam Chomsky? I used to have a mancrush on him, but Islamofascists sort of took the bloom off that flower...
http://livefromblogdahd.blogspot.com/
I'm confuzed. Why is it that are supposed to hate Chavez again? What is this whole boycott Citgo all about?
good movie picture
Chomsky thinks that everything in the world can be reduced to evil American corporations and imperialism and the reaction of the world to that. Anyone who thinks it is that simple is wrong, and Chavez comes from that line of thought.
It would be impossible to reduce the complicated dynamics of multinational political/ capital power to any single discrete idea.
"Everything" cannot be neatly distilled into any "one thing", which is a position erroneously suggested by demabloggery to be held by Chomsky and by extension Chavez. This mischaracterisation is deceptive and flawed, and thus may be summarily torn down. [See above comment]
Nonetheless, as a model defined to describe the complex interaction of multiple systems, Chomsky's "Hegemony Theory" is based on historical observations and manages to clearly outline a model that has predictive value and testable hypotheses.
I like Paul Berman's take on Chomsky: Chomsky is a man who thinks the entire world operates on simple and rational principles. The reason he's able to crank out these thousands of pages a year on all subjects is because he has an extremely simple analysis: Evil American corporations are acting in their own self-interest and trying to increase and spread their exploitation around the world. The American government is in their hands and is acting to expand its nefarious control over the world. The press has been corrupted by the wealth and power of corporations and spreads the propaganda messages required by the corporations. American claims to ever do any good around the world are merely hypocritical mendacities uttered for the purpose of advancing the larger cause of exploitation and oppression. And the response of other people in the world is that of resistance as inspired by an instinct for human freedom, even if the resistance sometimes takes a perverse and unfortunate form. Therefore, from Chomsky's point of view, all events are rationally explicable according to one or two tiny little factors: the self-interest of American corporations and the urge to resist the American corporations.
It's a very simpleminded view in which nothing inexplicable ever occurs. And yet although Chomsky is regarded by some people as the great anti-American, this kind of thought is entirely typical of America itself, of people across the political spectrum in America. People tend to think that everybody around the world is acting on some rational calculation, that the mad and pathological movements I describe that have emerged from the First World War really can't exist, that surely everybody is acting in some way in their own self-interest in a fashion that could be calculated and addressed. Finally, even the FBI and the CIA have obviously thought along these lines because it never crossed these people's minds -- not seriously anyway -- that somebody was going to be so mad to attack the United States directly. Sept. 11 revealed many shocking things and the most shocking was that the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. In that sense, everybody in the United States, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, everybody is a simpleminded fool.http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2003/03/22/berman/index_np.html?pn=4
ttp://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/chomsky.html
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000155.html
You may have already read this stuff, so apologies if you are ahead of me. I would however, like you to answer one question; what does Chomsky see as the root cause of Islamist extremism?
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And thanks for stopping by. I like your blog a lot. I'll be back if it's okay with you.
great stuff, terry tex referred me to your site. quite amazing the way fox continued to put up the captions. what about the rest of the speach?
I don't have any more of the speech, but I have a 20 minute interview with Chomsky that is fantastic. There is a link below the Chavez Video [red text], or you can see it at:
www.limbovision.org
VL
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