Noam Chomsky: predicting another holocaust?
Noam Chomsky was on Democracy Now the other day, and I pulled up the entire interview via YouTube. (I didn’t realize they put all of their interviews on YouTube. Personally, Amy Goodman looked very different in my mind.)
While he’s always a great speaker, one of the things Chomsky discussed sent a chill through me. Amy Goodman asked what he thought of the current populace rage, if he thought anything good could come of it.
Chomsky compared our current economic situation with the Germany of the 1920s. You know. And his comparisons are startlingly astute.
“In the 1920s, Germany was the absolute peak of civilization. Ten years later it was the absolute depths of barbarism. Now, if you listen to early Nazi propaganda, and you listen to talk radio in the United States, there is a resemblance. In both cases, we have a lot of demagogues, appealing to people with real grievances.
“For the American Population, the last 30 years have been some of the worst in economic history. It’s a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined. Working hours have shot up. Benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble, very real trouble after the bubbles burst.
“And they are angry, they want to know ‘what happened to me’. I’m a hardworking, white, god-fearing American. How come this is happening to me. That’s pretty much the Nazi appeal.”
I think he’s right in making this comparison. We’re really living in a very fragmented country. As the official unemployment toll reaches 10% (which could put the real numbers in the 20s) we’re seeing a huge divide between the haves and the have-nots. And the ‘have’ we’re talking about in this situation is way more than just flat screen TVs or fancy cars. We’re talking about food, homes, and health care. And unemployment is affecting everyone.
Beyond just unemployment, there is the ongoing huge cultural divide that’s the product of our expensive and sometimes unattainable educational system, and our geographical distance. I’m part of this divide. I take solace in big gay cities. When my previous employer would ask to send me to “Butt-Fucking-Nowhere”, I’d decline and let them send one of my sturdier, (sometimes smellier) and more red blooded colleagues. This even included Austin, Texas, which I’ve been told is a cultural and homosexual mecca, but well… I’m afraid of Texas.
I think this fear is unfortunately very real, if not inappropriate. Years ago my family found themselves in a very scary conflict with some hill-folk in Canada. We were river rafting, and after three days of being treated as sisters, my mother and her partner decided to give each other a peck on the cheek for shits and giggles.
The tour guide called them dykes. The person we were paying to protect us “out in the wilderness” felt completely comfortable issuing that statement. Immediately before calling them dykes, the tour guide called us city-folk. (Admittedly, our reaction was “Yeah…and?”).
While that anecdote occured beyond the border, I think it’s a genuine fear. We “city-folk” certainly don’t understand them. We call them the fly-over states, we make jokes about the Appalachians on national TV, and we mocked their beauty queen Sarah Palin. She wasn’t smart enough. Which was true. But by our standards. Not theirs.
Chomsky goes on to say:
“One of the [possible scapegoats] is what Rush Limbaugh tells you. In the Nazi case, it was the Jews and the Bolshevikz. Here it is the rich Democrats who run Wall Street and run the media and give everything away to illegal immigrants and so on and so forth.
“It kind of peaked during the Sarah Palin experience. Of all the candidates, Palin was the only one who used the phrase working class.
“The talk radio mob went crazy over her. One shouldn’t demean it. They describe themselves as ‘we are a fly by country’ and ‘they don’t care about us, those rich democrats on the west coast and the east coast are all interested in gay rights and giving things away to illegal immigrants.’
“They don’t care about us, the hardworking, god-fearing people. We’ve got to somehow rise up and take over and elect Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin or something like that.
“If by the next congressional election, the economy has not started to recover, this rage could boil over, and could have dangerous consequences.
“This country has a long history of being ridden by fear, it’s a very frightened country, it goes back to colonial times. We’re very lucky we’ve never had an honest demagogue. The demagogues we’ve had, they’ve never gotten anywhere. Suppose we had an honest Demagogue, Hitler-type, who was not corrupt.
“There is a background of concern and tremendous fear, searching for some answer which they are not getting from the establishment.
“Unless there is active, effective organizing and education, it’s dangerous.”
I think he’s right. In the gay marriage debate (a debate I’m thoroughly sick of, mind you) advocates encouraged people to go outside their boundaries. Reach out to voters outside of metropolitan areas.
I think this needs to be done in a manner which is all-inclusive and extends beyond gay rights. As a whole, this country needs to shed it’s differences, and reach out to the working class people. Try to get them on board. Have a realistic discussion with someone who has seen livestock outside of a zoo. If we don’t, I think Chomsky’s prediction could end up being tragically prescient.
Here’s the entire interview.
Part 1.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6