Dilip Simeon's blog

Chris Hedges: Worthy and Unworthy Victims      Dividing the world into worthy and unworthy victims is a tactic used to justify our crimes and demonize our enemies. Conflicts will not be solved until all nations abide by international law and all victims are deemed worthy.   Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable.  This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fra...

The left-wing author slammed Democrats as well as Republicans during the interview, stressing that Democrats moved away from New Deal economic policies during the centrist presidencies of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s and Bill Clinton during the 1990s. "By the late 1970s — the late Carter years — the Democrats basically told the working class, 'We don't have any interest in you,'" Chomsky said. "The last gasp of pro-labor activity in the Democratic Party was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978. Carter didn't veto it, but he watered it down so it was toothless. From that point on, the Democrats essentially abandoned the working class, aside from a few gestures here and there."… https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/noam-chomsky/ AOC blasts colleagues for feeding 'right-wing vitriol' The growing intra-party rift started with a tweet last week from Omar, which said, "We must have the same level of accountability and justice for a...

Noam Chomsky, one of the world's foremost public intellectuals, has provided the international left with wisdom, guidance and inspiration for nearly 60 years. Proving that he operates at the locus where argumentation and activism meet, he demonstrates indispensable intellectual leadership on issues of foreign policy, democratic socialism and rejection of corporate media bromides. Deregulatory rush shows Trump White House willing to 'scorch the Earth before they go' One of the founders of linguistics, he is also an American dissident who has wrestled with systems of power on matters no less important than genocide, war and poverty, creating a corpus of classics, ranging from his manifesto against the Vietnam War, "American Power and the New Mandarins," to his amplification of reason against a jingoistic cacophony following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, "9-11." "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media," which he c...

As the U.S. coronavirus death toll tops 150,000, we spend the hour with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky, who says decades of neoliberal policies that shredded the social safety net and public institutions left the country ill-prepared for a major health crisis. “We should understand the roots of this pandemic,” he says... Remember Ronald Reagan - that government is the problem, not the solution, which means we have to take decision-making and action out of the hands of government, which has a flaw; it’s somewhat responsive to the population. We have to shift it to unaccountable, private tyrannies, which are totally unaccountable to the population. That is the meaning of Reagan’s slogan. That is the fundamental principle of neoliberalism. We’ve been suffering - the world has been suffering from it for 40 years, except for the tiny percentage who have become super rich and extremely powerful NOAM CHOMSKY We should understand the roots of this p...

George Russell Lakey  (born 2 November 1937) is an activist,  sociologist , and writer who added academic underpinning to the concept of  nonviolent revolution . He also refined the practice of experiential training for activists which he calls "Direct Education". A  Quaker , he has co-founded and led numerous organizations and campaigns for justice and peace.”  Emergencies have a way of shaking up old, limiting beliefs. The coronavirus pandemic is pushing people back to the drawing board.  In the United States, many are noticing the institutional failures forced on us in recent decades, during what billionaire Warren Buffett calls the “class warfare” waged by the economic elite. The health crisis opens the door to bolder thinking. Even establishment politicians today consider moves that cost trillions, but their motivation is to save the existing system, not to transition to a better one. In one stunning sentence, Noam Chomsky nails the most overlooke...

Building on a friendship initiated in Sandinista Nicaragua of the 1980s, Wallace Shawn - a committed activist but someone who is best known as an accomplished dramatist and actor - interviewed scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky. In their discussion, Shawn reflected on Chomsky’s words and called on him to address the ever-challenging question: how do we convince the people who were not in the room to care, to take action, given the scope and urgency of our current political crises?  The following transcript is excerpted from their conversation, which can be read in full in Internationalism or Extinction , edited by Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar and Paul Shannon.  WALLACE SHAWN: Many of the people who do know about the consequences of nuclear war and climate change are quite well-educated people who are resented by a lot of people. Do you have any thoughts on how, I mean there is a class difference that Trump supporters who laugh at the idea of global warming and clim...

AMY GOODMAN:  Today, a  Democracy Now!  special, an hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned dissident and father of modern linguistics. In April, Noam Chomsky visited his hometown of Boston, where he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for more than half a century. He now teaches at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Over 700 people packed into the Old South Church to hear him speak. Later in the broadcast, we’ll air my on-stage interview with him, but first we turn to his speech. NOAM CHOMSKY:  If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to start with a brief reminiscence of a period which is eerily similar to today in many unpleasant respects. I’m thinking of exactly 80 years ago, almost to the day, happened to be the moment of the first article that I remember having written on political issues. Easy to date: It was right after the fall of Barcelona in February 1939. The article was about what seemed to be the inexorable spread of fascism o...

The clampdown on political dissent since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014 has received global attention with an association of social justice activists and scholars called ‘Fresh Perspectives, USA’ condemning the “illegal arrests” of human rights activists in India. In a statement signed by Noam Chomsky, James Petras and Angela Davis among others, the group says that in recent months, the Maharashtra police has arrested several prominent human rights activists including Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha and others in the Bhima Koregaon case.“All these social activists have a long history of challenging state violence and human rights abuses through democratic and constitutional means,” said the statement. It added that in Modi’s India, attacks on Dalits, adivasis, rationalists, Muslims and other religious minorities have continued and intensified.  In a strong condemnation of the Modi government, the statement further ...

By C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout | Interview -  Since the late 1970s, the world's economy and dominant nations have been marching to the tune of (neoliberal) globalization, whose impact and effects on average people's livelihood and communities everywhere are generating great popular discontent, accompanied by a rising wave of nationalist and anti-elitist sentiments. But what exactly is driving globalization? And who really benefits from globalization? Are globalization and capitalism interwoven? How do we deal with the growing levels of inequality and massive economic insecurity? Should progressives and radicals rally behind the call for the introduction of a universal basic income? In the unique and exclusive interview below, two leading minds of our time, linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky and Cambridge University economist Ha-Joon Chang, share their views on these essential questions.  C. J. Polychroniou: Globalization is usually referred to as a process of...

"What it’s called is “freedom,” but “freedom” means a subordination to the decisions of concentrated, unaccountable, private power. That’s what it means. The institutions of governance—or other kinds of association that could allow people to participate in decision making—those are systematically weakened. Margaret Thatcher said it rather nicely in her aphorism about "there is no society, only individuals".. She was actually, unconsciously no doubt, paraphrasing Marx, who in his condemnation of the repression in France said, “The repression is turning society into a sack of potatoes, just individuals, an amorphous mass can’t act together.” That was a condemnation. For Thatcher, it’s an ideal—and that’s neoliberalism. We destroy or at least undermine the governing mechanisms by which people at least in principle can participate to the extent that society’s democratic. So weaken them, undermine unions, other forms of association, leave a sack of potatoes and meanwhile t...

What does Trump's victory mean, and what can one expect from this megalomaniac when he takes over the reins of power on January 20, 2017? What is Trump's political ideology, if any, and is "Trumpism" a movement? Will US foreign policy be any different under a Trump administration? For more original Truthout election coverage see:  "Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016." Some years ago, public intellectual Noam Chomsky warned that the political climate in the US was ripe for the rise of an authoritarian figure. Now, he shares his thoughts on the aftermath of this election, the moribund state of the US political system and why Trump is a real threat to the world and the planet in general. John Oliver on Trump; Trump compared to Jacob Zuma C.J. Polychroniou for Truthout: Noam, the unthinkable has happened: In contrast to all forecasts, Donald Trump scored a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton, and the man that Michael Moore described as a "w...

As global capitalism, with neoliberalism being a necessary accompaniment, has covered now the entire globe, it is extremely useful to revisit some of the great radical traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries -- namely, anarchism and communism. What do they stand for? What are their main differences? Did Soviet Communism represent an authentic form of socialism or was it a "reformed workers' state" -- or, even worse, a tyrannical form of state capitalism? In this exclusive interview for Truthout , Noam Chomsky shares his views on anarchism, communism, and revolutions in hopes that the new generation of radical activists does not ignore history and continue to grapple with questions about strategies for social change. C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, from the late 19th century to the mid or even late 20th century, anarchism and communism represented live and vital movements throughout the Western world, but also in Latin America and certain parts of Asia and Africa. However,...

For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong NB: There have been several critical reactions to this piece, links to which are at the bottom of this post - DS Vyvyan Evans: Real talk Imagine you’re a traveller in a strange land. A local approaches you and starts jabbering away in an unfamiliar language. He seems earnest, and is pointing off somewhere. But you can’t decipher the words, no matter how hard you try. That’s pretty much the position of a young child when she first encounters language. In fact, she would seem to be in an even more challenging position. Not only is her world full of ceaseless gobbledygook; unlike our hypothetical traveller, she isn’t even aware that these people are  attempting  to communicate. And yet, by the age of four, every cognitively normal child on the planet has been transformed into a linguistic genius: this before formal schooling, before they can ride bicy...