IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE

LORENZO—Noam Chomsky is, as anyone reading this knows, a linguist, MIT professor, and the English-speaking world’s foremost radical dissident intellectual. Chomsky’s work in this latter capacity is so well-documented that it’s not necessary to recapitulate too much—however, a few choice high notes include decades of criticism of US foreign policy, some decent commentary on then-President-elect Barack Obama at a time nearly all of the Western commentariat had turned into a deranged Borg-like collective, and producing the second comprehensive study of corporate constraints on the media along with Edward Herman. As co-author of Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky provided a model illuminating the “political economy of the mass media,” and from this research came a great deal of very useful and incisive media criticism on issues like how concision and sound-bites help the status quo and why a journalist can be both genuine and compromised. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model purports to show how five corporate filters enable the mass media’s owners to ensure that their interests are expressed. In this way, according to the two, democracies manufacture consent through seamlessly delivered propaganda, the way totalitarian societies do so by coercion and force.

BRUCE LERRO—Thus DSA, Jacobin magazine, Socialist Alternative and Global Exchange will always find a welcoming ear on the radio waves and journals of the Left Gatekeepers. Noam Chomsky, proclaimed anarchist, can come onto Democracy Now whenever he wants. But Michael Parenti, who will defend the Soviet Union or China and who is quite capable of matching Noam Chomsky, rarely gets on the air.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—Defenders of capitalism like to think that its “congruency with human nature” explains its “stability” —three centuries and counting—a coy way of saying it has not been overthrown yet or disintegrated from its own numerous flaws, crimes, and contradictions. For if this premise were true how do we explain the astonishing longevity of previous systems, some lasting thousands of years? Wouldn’t that fact attest to their congruency with human nature? Ot are we to believe that  those multitudes of generations before ours were less than human? And if the explanation to that is that “human nature” evolved, changed, etc., what made it change except its enveloping culture, as E,K Hunt and others have pointed out?

RON RIDENOUR—The first social democratic government in the world occurred in Finland, in 1907, eight years after the founding of the social democratic party. In 1916, S.D. won an absolute majority and governed alone for the only time. German social democrats achieved their first government in 1918 upon the end of the First World War. Sweden had its first S.D. government in 1921. The second oldest social democrat party was led by postal worker Louis Pio in Denmark, in 1871, inspired by the Paris Commune. The social democrats formed its first government in 1924, the same year the social democratic Labour Party was elected to govern in England. Norway’s S.D. ruled first in 1928 but fell after two weeks. The party split into two, one fraction created the Communist Party.

During the occupation of Greece the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS destroyed, totally or in part, more than 1000 villages and killed many thousands of civilians. The German commanding officer sought in this way to crush the resistance of the partisans to the occupation. In all respects it failed.