Noam Chomsky Documentary

[bcholmes]

I have a number of Noam Chomsky documentaries. I just found a new one at my local DVD rental place: Imperial Grand Strategy (which appears to be mis-categorized in Amazon.ca as a hardcover book).

So I was watching it while I was waiting for my new mattress to be delivered (I have a new bed!) I quite enjoyed it. Two parts really stand out in my mind:

1. He talked about how the anti-war movement now is different than the anti-war movement of the 60s. Chomsky mentioned that Iraq might have been the first war in history for which the anti-war movement mobilised before the actual war. He also talked about a section of a leaked government document that revealed that around 1968, Johnson wanted to send more troups to Vietnam, but the military refused, saying that if the war went much longer, the troups would be needed to keep the populace in check. "Governments should be afraid of their people."
2. During an interview on Anarchy, Chomsky made an interesting comment the sort of mixed attitudes toward outsourcing. Should we be for it (because it gives people in developing nations jobs and can help improve working conditions) or against it (because there are lots of people in North America that need those jobs)? Chomsky argued that both positions presuppose that the things like pay and working conditions can't be changed and that both positions pit poor and working class people against each other (our poor fights their poor for jobs). We don't think about reallocating wealth from the privileged classes. I was reminded of Linda McQuaig's observation from Shooting the Hippo that we might say "we have no choice but to slash social services", but we don't seem to say "we have no choice but to tax the banks".

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Cool; I added that to my zip.ca list. Is there anything else of that sort that you would recommend?

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Once we have enough willpower to deal with surplus wealth, we'll have enough wherewithal to deal with poverty.