Walker wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 3:12 pm
Hey, thanks for the intelligent comments although as a Chompsky illiterate, I glean his meaning from his lineage as continued by the one who most often quotes and references him ... Gary.
May I try to describe what, in my view, the entire issue revolves around? Doing so, I believe, will provide a very real clarity that, at least one hopes, we might all put to use.
Our country is an extension of a European world-conquering, or dominating, movement in history. Right there,
exactly right there, and when what is entailed in colonial projects, conquest, domination, extending domain, procuring raw materials like lumber, gold, silver and everything else that can be imagined, is what Chomsky and the Chomskian view cannot abide. The reasons are simple and obvious: these expansion projects involve going out and grabbing what is there to be grabbed. There is no other way to put it nor to
see it. They came, they saw, they conquered, they took, they
built -- and this is how our civilization was created, plain and simple. We cannot back out of this as realness, as reality. And here is the crucial element: all the systems of enterprise that were put in motion (mining, lumber, plantations, the extraction of myriad natural resources including that of persons (as serfs, as slaves) all these enterprises are
on-going. The essential model is still, obviously, operative.
With that said, I refer to Chomsky's
Year 501: The Conquest Continues. It is a brilliant book in its way because its thesis is exactly what I described. They came, the conquered, and they set up funnel-like extraction-systems and transport systems from the hinterlands down to the ports where the goods, and the values, and the life-materials, were floated off to Europe. What Chomsky points out in this work is just what I say: the core model still exists although certainly with the development of local economies in the various countries there is a circulation of resources and not exclusively an economy of exploitation. But here's the thing: everyone in those countries lives in the aftermath of everything that went before. In this sense "the conquest continues".
Now we turn to Gary but I mean Gary as an emblem of how people think about *their world*. It has to do with the model through which they perceive reality. Gary cannot bear the thought of but really more the feeling of the exploitation he has become aware of. He cannot *support* or condone the present in many ways because he cannot reconcile himself to the realness, the reality, of how all of this -- our culture, our states, our economies, our nation, the world we live in, highways, agricultural fields, mining, industry EVERYTHING -- came to be.
The Chomskian narrative -- or better put
analysis (it is
thoroughly Marxian) -- necessarily involves the citizen, the participant, the individual, in an act of turning against this history to which he is intimately tied; of which he is a product and outcome. He must turn against all of that because of the
moral imperative. Test this by finding a person
who can or will defend the founding of the US, and all that was constructed here, including the so-called *genocide* that certainly took place (in large part through communicable disease but also as a stark result of
takeover), and the enslavement of primitive tribal Africans in the plantations of the South, as an historical process that is as old as time itself.
In order for that individual to defend, therefore, his own self in the present world, there are two basic choices: One, that he turn against the entirety of the immorality through which it was all built and made possible. He does this to preserve his *moral standing*. Or two -- and this is far more tricky -- he must create defenses and justifications for all that was done, all that happened, and he must therefore defend the realness of the world and the reality of how things actually function. He must then become immoral or in any case
amoral.
This is why I
continually refer to
this video and its narration. And no one seems to get it! No one can actually respond to the essence of what it states.
Now with that said let's be realistic: Chomsky says he is an Anarcho-Syndicalist. Actually what that means is
a communist. Give it the shade you want but Anarcho-Syndicalism is really another word for
communism. Because when you think things through that is the only moral alternative that his elaborated outlook can allow. That is what it proposes or leads to.
about him through his effect upon you, is that rather than look to the strengths of democracy, he looks to weaknesses of democracy that are made possible by unvirtuous actions, actions intent on corrupting the intent of the constitution, intent as clarified by The Declaration of Independence. His predication of judgement upon democracy's weak points that can be assailed by the unvirtuous assumes that such corruption cannot be controlled by the good folks in society, and in fact it can’t be controlled when weakness to protect and uphold the constitution rules the day, such as the current unconstitutional weakness being demonstrated by the current VP in her dereliction of duty, whose only job is to intervene and take over the presidency when the elected president becomes unfit for presidential duties … which Biden clearly is and in fact was to those paying attention when he was elected, although technically at that time he could still walk and chew gum for more than six hours a day.
