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From: estabrook carl g <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.noam-chomsky
Subject: Chomsky's Birthday
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 13:35:26 -0600
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 50
NNTP-Posting-Host: ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Happy birthday to ANC from the staff of
"News from Neptune: the Chomskyan News Hour"
10-11am Saturdays on WEFT (FM 90.1)
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
"If the left is understood to include 'Bolshevism,' then
I would flatly dissociate myself from the left. Lenin
was one of the greatest enemies of socialism, in my
opinion, for reasons I've discussed. The idea that
workers are only interested in horse-racing [as the
Fabian socialist, Beatrice Webb, said] is an
absurdity that cannot withstand even a superficial look
at labour history or the lively and independent working
class press that flourished in many places, including
the manufacturing towns of New England not many miles
from where I'm writing - not to speak of the inspiring
record of the courageous struggles of persecuted and
oppressed people throughout history, until this very
moment. Take the most miserable corner of this
hemisphere, Haiti, regarded by the European conquerors
as a paradise and the source of no small part of
Europe's wealth, now devastated, perhaps beyond
recovery. In the past few years, under conditions so
miserable that few people in the rich countries can
imagine them, peasants and slum-dwellers constructed a
popular democratic movement based on grassroots
organisations that surpasses just about anything I know
of elsewhere; only deeply committed commissars could
fail to collapse with ridicule when they hear the
solemn pronouncements of American intellectuals and
political leaders about how the US has to teach
Haitians the lessons of democracy. Their achievements
were so substantial and frightening to the powerful
that they had to be subjected to yet another dose of
vicious terror, with considerably more US support than
is publicly acknowledged, and they still have not
surrendered. Are they interested only in horse-racing?
"I'd suggest some lines I've occasionally quoted from
Rousseau: `when I see multitudes of entirely naked
savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure
hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only
their independence, I feel that it does not behoove
slaves to reason about freedom'."
--Noam Chomsky, May 1995
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