Chomsky for Activists

Noam Chomsky, Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, Paul Shannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000216509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sostegno politico

Those who regard him as a "doom and gloom" critic will find an unexpected Chomsky in these pages. Here the world-renowned author speaks for the first time in depth about his career in activism, and his views and tactics.
Chomsky offers new and intimate details about his life-long experience as an activist, revealing him as a critic with deep convictions and many surprising insights about movement strategies. The book points to new directions for activists today, including how the crises of the Coronavirus and the economic meltdown are exploding in the critical 2020 US presidential election year. Readers will find hope and new pathways toward a sustainable, democratic world.

Part 1
Reflections on a Life of Activism

I was a 10-year-old kid… There was real fear of the rise of fascism in Europe, which was personalized by the fact that in my own [Philadelphia] neighborhood… it was right around me. The Germans and the Irish Catholics were pro-Nazi. I remember beer parties when Paris fell. Just being a kid on the streets, interacting with other kids. I mean, it wasn’t like now. You’re not going to get murdered. No shootings, no knifings, but it was difficult and unpleasant.

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It was also pretty tense because we were getting involved in really direct open resistance and expecting long jail sentences. But there was also a mass public opposition by 1968–1969 getting a million people demonstrating. For years, my recollection of Washington, my sense of Washington was tear gas and mace because that’s what was going on.

I was there [in 1971] with a group of what were called older people. We were maybe [in our] ’40s. Howard [Zinn], Marilyn Young, Dan Ellsberg. We were a small affinity group and we were trying to get arrested, and they wouldn’t arrest us because they only wanted to arrest young people. So, you sit in the middle of the street and police cars are racing toward you, but they swerve right around you, and meanwhile some kid walking with jeans on the sidewalk, they’d pick him up.

1 How It All Got Started

Noam Chomsky, Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, and Paul Shannon

So, we figured we could have a march from Harvard to the Boston Common, the normal place for meetings, and have a demonstration at the Boston Common. The march went okay. There was a huge police presence, state police, in the Common. We got to the bandstand. A couple speakers got up. I was one of the speakers. You couldn’t hear a word. We were drowned out by counter-demonstrators, many of them students marching in from the universities. The police protected people like us from being murdered.

PAUL: So Noam, you have spent most of the last 50 or 60 years in this area, in Greater Boston. And people—especially outside of this area—have an image of Boston as kind of a very liberal and pro-peace place to live. I wonder if you could talk about what it was like for you and for others back in the mid-’60s, trying to engage in actions in Boston related to the war or civil rights or other issues.

NOAM: Well, let’s take civil rights. There was strong support for the Civil Rights Movement as long as it was focusing on racist sheriffs in Alabama. Then, a lot of outrage, anger, how could they do these terrible things, and so on. When you listen to the rhetoric on Martin Luther King’s Day, it ends with “I have a dream.” He didn’t stop there. He went on to the North, to try to organize a Poor People’s Movement that took pretty radical positions. He was assassinated, after all, when he was in Memphis to support a sanitation worker strike. He was on his way to Washington, he hoped, to organize a Resurrection City, a big demonstration, and lay the basis for a Poor People’s Movement—black and white.

As soon as he started on that, his appeal to northern liberals sharply declined. He also came out strongly against the Vietnam War. Not early, incidentally, later on, but even that was held against him. That part of his career, which for him was the peak of his career, was not just about voting rights for blacks in the South. That’s almost wiped out of the legacy. The reason is it just was not acceptable to northern liberals. We could go into how when school desegregation was implemented in Boston, notice how it was done by liberal leaders. It was done so as to exclude the affluent white suburbs and to integrate Irish and black areas. That’s a recipe for race riots.

An Irish guy working for a telephone company gets a small house, lives in a community with his friends, and wants to send his kid to the local high school, cheer for the football team. This is taken away from him. Now his kid has to go to a black area, a black kid comes to his area. While in the affluent suburbs, you cluck your tongue about the racism of the Boston Irish. I mean, that’s a model for the way it was done, in Boston and around the country. That’s the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, well, we know the outcomes.

Let’s go back to the anti-war movement. Boston is a liberal city. The war escalated. The war was going on in the 1950s. Maybe 60,000 or 70,000 people were killed in South Vietnam under the highly brutal, repressive government the United States was supporting. No protest. Nobody even noticed. In 1961 and 1962, Kennedy sharply escalated the war. He ordered US planes to start bombing South Vietnam. It was under South Vietnamese markings, but everybody knew they were US planes. He authorized napalm. He began programs of chemical warfare for crop destruction and livestock destruction, part of an effort to drive much of the population into what amounted to concentration camps or urban slums. This was a sharp escalation.

You couldn’t talk about it. I mean, I was giving talks then where I’d ask somebody if they could invite a couple of people to their living room, and we could talk to maybe four or five people. That was a talk. Or maybe some church where they’d let three or four people in to have a meeting, basically nothing. There were a few meetings at the universities, if we tried. A couple of us were concerned. We wanted MIT or Harvard, in the early 1960s, to have a discussion that would bring in Vietnam. You had to bring in 10 other topics, one of them being Vietnam, and then maybe you could get a couple of people to listen to it.

It was beginning to change by the mid-1960s. In February 1965, the United States began bombing North Vietnam. That became an issue, the idea that you’re bombing another country. South Vietnam was fair game. In fact, almost the entire world was against South Vietnam, but that’s okay. We’re allowed to do what we want in South Vietnam. The illusion is we’re defending the people. We’re actually attacking them, and the people who really knew about the war like Bernard Fall were very clear and frank about this. The bombing of North Vietnam did raise issues. For one thing, it might bring in the Russians, it might bring in the Chinese, dangerous and so on. It was beginning to become possible to talk about the bombing of North Vietnam.

Liberal intellectuals and scientists were advocating a barrier that would prevent North Vietnamese from coming to the south to support South Vietnamese guerrillas the United States was attacking. That was considered a super liberal idea, because it would then allow us to attack South Vietnam without any interference. That was the mentality, kind of, on the left. I remember these proposals being made to me, saying, “Look, you shouldn’t oppose what our government’s doing, because look how progressive it is.”

Now, internationally there was a protest movement. And on October 15, 1965 there was an international day of protest. By that time, South Vietnam had been half destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of American troops were pouring into the country. The bombing of North Vietnam had gone on for months. It was a pretty big issue by then.

So, we figured we could have a march from Harvard to the Boston Common, the normal place for meetings, and have kind of a demonstration at the Boston Common. The march went okay. There was a huge police presence, state police, in the Common. We got to the bandstand. A couple speakers got up. I was one of the speakers. You couldn’t hear a word. We were drowned out by counter-demonstrators, many of them students marching in from the universities. The police protected people like us from being murdered. Not because they liked us, but they just didn’t want bloodshed in the Boston Common. Take a look at the Boston Globe the next day, probably most of the liberal papers in the country: bitter denunciations of what happened—denunciations namely of the demonstrators! How could they dare to say we shouldn’t bomb North Vietnam, and shouldn’t support our glorious country, and so on. That was 1965.

The second international day of protest was March 1966. We figured we can’t have something on the Common. We’ll have it in church. We had a meeting in the Arlington Street Church, right near the Common. The church was attacked by demonstrators throwing cans and tomatoes and defacing the church. That was March 1966. That’s Boston.

Take a look at Congress. The liberal Congressmen who later presented themselves as anti-war—figures like Mike Mansfield and others—were bitterly condemning the demonstrators in April of 1966. Now back in 1965, April of 1965, Howard Zinn and two or three other people decided to call ourselves the Delegation of New England Professors and go down to Washington to lobby our representatives. It was pretty interesting. The senior senator, Saltonstall, invited us into his office. We had a polite conversation. At the end, he looked at us, and he said, “I really don’t understand what you’re doing here. The president has spoken.” In fact, he had given a speech saying we’re sending a couple hundred thousand more troops, so what more is there to talk about?

We went to see Tip O’Neill, later considered a great anti-war activist. He literally wouldn’t let us into his office. He didn’t want to have these Commie rats spoiling his office. We actually talked to Ted Kennedy, the junior senator. He was very accommodating, even invited us to lunch in the Senate dining room, but said, “I really don’t know much about this kind of business. Foreign affairs is my brother’s concern. It may be interesting, but not interesting to me.” That’s what it was like in the mid-1960s.

PAUL: People don’t know that.

NOAM: A year or two later, it changed, but it was a struggle.

PAUL: Now, you’re talking about getting involved in these demonstrations in the mid-60s. When was the first demonstration or protest event that you went to in your life?

NOAM: In my life?

PAUL: Yes.

NOAM: Well, I mean, I wasn’t actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement, but I did go down there. They had a big demonstration in Jackson, Mississippi, which was pretty brutal and bloody.

PAUL: Where did you grow up?

NOAM: Philadelphia, in a place where I was scared to death of people like you, literally. It was the Irish kids down the block who were really frightening.

PAUL: Yeah, you were afraid for a good reason.

NOAM: They went to the local Catholic school. They were violently anti-Semitic. We were the only Jewish family in the area, so I carefully avoided the Irish kids. It took me a long time to get over it.

PAUL: Your parents were very smart in giving you that advice. When did you start thinking in terms of the direction the country was going?

NOAM: It was very early. In fact, my wife, Valeria, and I were in Barcelona watching television on November 8th when the news was coming in about the (2016) election. Which, for me, had a significant personal element to it. The first article I remember writing was in February 1939, right after the fall of Barcelona to Franco. The article, I’m sure, was not very memorable. I was a 10-year-old kid.

PAUL: You were 10 years old?

NOAM: It was about the rise of fascism in Europe: Austria, Germany, Toledo in Spain, and Barcelona. It looked as if its spread is inexorable, like it’s going to go all over everywhere. That was the ’30s. There was real fear of the rise of fascism in Europe, which was personalized by the fact that in my own neighborhood where I lived…

PAUL: In Philadelphia…

NOAM: … it was right around me. The German and the Irish Catholics were pro-Nazi. I remember beer parties when Paris fell. Just being a kid on the streets, interacting with other kids. I mean, it wasn’t like now. You’re not going to get murdered. No shootings, no knifings, but it was difficult and unpleasant t...