POTENTIAL FOR FASCISM

Noam Chomsky says:

In the 1970's it was another upsurge of foundations trying to take over the educational institutions...the effect has been to pretty much demolish civil society, to turn people into what is the ideal...a completely fragmented, atomized society where everyone is totally alone doing nothing but trying to pursue created wants...go to work, get lower and lower wages for more and more hours and less and less benefits and security in a flexible labor market: that's the kind of utopia they're looking for and it's not very far from there... the country is (now) like a devastated peasant society. You really have to go back to Europe and the black death in the fourteenth century to find anything similar: people are scared, angry, hostile, hate everything, don't know what they hate, don't have anybody else to talk to, just angry, desperate. There are cults all over the place at a scale that is unknown in any other society...the level of religious fundamentalism alone is probably the highest in the world...higher than Iran...not (just) the right; the left is the same...it's just a dissolved society...the portent is ominous...the kind of a situation that, indeed, is reminiscent of Germany in the late 30's...or Iran in the late 70's.

Chomsky said this during a lecture on class war in 1996, five years before the September 11th terrorist attacks. As far as I can tell, things have only gotten worse. Listen to streaming audio of the entire lecture here.

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