TWO GOOD CHOMSKY INTERVIEWS

First an interview with the Guerrilla News Network courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

GNN: What is it about the paradigm of the media that makes it so afraid to deconstruct them as you do?

Chomsky: For the most part educated intellectuals are subservient to power, and there is nothing new to that. You can go back to classical Greece and the Bible and you find the same story.

Take the Bible, we're all supposed to be very Bible worshipping. There were people in the Bible who we would call intellectuals, then they called them a word that is translated as "prophets," but they weren't prophesizing anything. They were basically intellectuals, they were giving geo-political analysis, they were calling for moral behavior, treating orphans and women properly and so on. They were public intellectuals criticizing power and calling for moral behavior and they also predicting that the efforts of the kings trying to extend their power would led to destruction - all the things that critical intellectuals are supposed to do. How were they treated? Where they praised? No, they were imprisoned, driven into the desert, despised.

Hundreds of years later they were honored. Not then.

The ones that were honored were the flatterers who courted the king, and praised those in power.

Those intellectuals are now called false prophets.

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Next, an interview with David Barsamian of Z Magazine courtesy of ZNet:

So you go to, say, the 1930s, perhaps the founder of a good bit of modern political science. A liberal Wilsonian, Harold Lasswell, in 1933 wrote an article called “Propaganda” in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, a major publication, in which the message was, “We should not [all of these are quotes, incidentally] succumb to democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.” They’re not, we are. And since people are too stupid and ignorant to understand their best interests, for their own benefit—because we’re great humanitarians—we must marginalize and control them. The best means is propaganda. There is nothing negative about propaganda, he said. It’s as neutral as a pump handle. You can use it for good or for evil. And since we’re noble, wonderful people, we’ll use it for good, to ensure that the stupid, ignorant masses remain marginalized and separated from any decision-making capacity.

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