From jad@ckuxb.att.com Ukn Jan 7 12:10:58 1993 Received: from att-out.att.com by css.itd.umich.edu (5.67/2.2) id AA08721; Thu, 7 Jan 93 12:10:56 -0500 Message-Id: <9301071710.AA08721@css.itd.umich.edu> To: pauls@css.itd.umich.edu Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 12:07:24 EST From: jad@ckuxb.att.com (John A Dinardo) Status: RO X-Status: Article 18879 of alt.conspiracy: Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.activism,alt.society.civil-liberty,alt.individualism,alt.censorship,misc.headlines,soc.culture.usa,misc.activism.progressive Subject: Part 2, NOAM CHOMSKY: The New World Order Message-ID: <1993Jan6.221314.3247@mont.cs.missouri.edu> Followup-To: alt.conspiracy Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Keywords: Noam Chomsky: The New World Order Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu Organization: The Turing Project, Public Access Internet Host Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Lines: 155 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (continuation) NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that hits the nail on the head. The primary concern of the United States in the Third World has, in fact, always been the problem of meaningful democracy which is, in fact, a threat to power and privilege. And that has to be crushed. It has to be crushed abroad, and it has to be crushed at home. And without understanding that, you understand very little about doestic or foreign affairs, or about American society and culture. Now, of course, the methods for crushing democratic forces at home and abroad are different. Abroad, you can do it pretty much in the way that it's done by totalitarian states. They use violence. In fact, unrestricted violence. At home, over centuries of popular struggle, the capacity of the state to coerce and control has been limited, so a whole variety of other devices have been needed. But it's been well understood -- and it's a major theme of intellectual discourse, if you like, for centuries -- that methods have to be found to control and divert what they call "the rascal multitude" and to keep them from interfering in what is none of their business; namely the management of public affairs. As Walter Lippmann put it: "The elements that rule have to be protected from meddling and ignorant outsiders -- that is, the mass of the population. And if you can't do it by force, you do it by other means. Well, a few weeks after this report on the extraordinarily positive relations with the Mexican tyranny, a leading journal in Mexico published an article reporting on a conference in Mexico -- a conference on international traffic of children, minors -- the report quotes a leading researcher at the National University, the autonomous university in Mexico, from the institute for law research, who writes: every year, twenty thousand Mexican children are sent illegally to the United States for organ transplants or for sexual exploitation, or for various experimental tests. The conference report also quotes a report of the United Nations saying that over a million children a year suffer from slavery, forced participation in criminal acts, prostitution, organ transplant sales to rich countries. Well, is any of this true? The answer to that is: Nobody really knows, and more importantly, nobody cares -- at least nobody important cares. It's not the kind of thing we discuss around here. But whether it's true or not (it may be; it may not be) an interesting fact about our domains is that this is very widely believed. There are lots and lots of reports like this one from all through Latin America and other parts of the Third World domains, largely of the United States, that report such things. You can get similar reports from the London Anti-Slavery Society and others. And whether they're true or not, the fact that they're widely believed alone is a reflection of the reality of life in the areas where our influence has been overwhelming. This became much worse during the Reagan-Bush years which was a period of an enormous catastrophe of capitalism throughout the entire world, aside from the state-capitalist industrial countries themselves which, in various ways, were able to protect themselves from it. Latin America is a striking example. We might proceed with Latin America by quoting .... I'll just pick something that happened to arrive in the mail yesterday, a Latin American church journal which has an article from Uruguay by a Uruguayan journalist called, "The War Waged on Latin American Street Kids" (that's the English translation of it) and he describes (I'll give some quotes) the war being waged against millions of abandonded children throughout Latin America where death squads, run by the police and financed by the business sector, target and exterminate street kids who are trying to survive as beggars, thieves, prostitutes, drug runners or cheap factory workers. Some of the victims are gunned down while they are sleeping beneath bridges, on vacant lots or on doorways. Others are kidnapped, tortured or killed in remote areas. In Brazil, where U.S. influence has been decisive .... the overthrow of Brazilian democracy was described as the greatest victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century by the Administration when it took place with no little U.S. support .... In Brazil, the bodies of young death squad victims are found in zones outside the metropolitan areas with their hands tied, showing signs of torture, riddled with bullet holes. Street girls are frequently forced to work as prostitutes. In one town, in the first six months of 1991, a thousand so-called "disposable children" were assassinated. In Guatemala City, another place where we have succeeded in imposing the kind of values we like, the majority of the five thousand street kids work as prostitutes. They are found with their ears cut off and their eyes gouged out, and so on. In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, reports indicate that an average of three children under the age of eighteen are killed daily by these death squads financed by the business community. Almost all murders have been attributed to those death squads. Going on, the journalist points out that this is a region where a hundred and eighty-three million people live in abject poverty, so that death by violence is only one of the threats for street children. Regional statistics show that every minute, twenty-eight children die from hunger. According to UNICEF, sixty-nine million children survive by doing menial labor, robbing, running drugs, and prostitution. In Ecuador, about a hundred thousand children from age four up work ten to twelve-hour shifts in one region -- in Western-run, mostly U.S.-run corporations. Panama had a system of protection for miners, but the miners' protective tribunal buildings were bombed during the 1989 U.S. invasion, rendering work there nearly impossible. Following the invasion, the number of criminal gangs robbing stores in search of food increased. In Peru, fifty thousand of the six hundred thousand children born this year will not survive their first year. In one Brazilian state on the Bolivian border, appoximately a thousand children work as slaves extracting tin. Another two thousand adolescents work as prostitutes. According to union sources, children work eighteen hours a day in water, up to their knees, and are paid a daily ration of bananas and boiled yucca, according to the labor union reports. Going on (I won't go on reading it), the journalist ends up saying: "Until recently, the image of the abandoned Latin American child was of a ragged child sleeping in a doorway. Today, the image is of a body lacerated and dumped in a city slum. Well, we may feel proud of our contributions to this picture of capitalist democracy triumphant in the "new world order", and that's what the "new world order" is all about -- an intensification of the horrors of the old world order. (to be continued) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * A 90-minute video documentary, from which this transcript was made, is available exclusively from JCOME. In addition to the full Chomsky lecture, the documentary contains background information about Chomsky and about JCOME, the only Jewish-American organization of which Chomsky is a member of the Advisory Committee. JCOME is extending a special offer at this time. To get a copy of the video documentary simply send a check for $20 (only $15 for the documentary and $5 shipping) and indicate you read about Chomsky and JCOME on Internet or e-mail. Send to: The Jewish Committee on the Middle East P.O. Box 18367 Washington, D.C. 20036 Phone orders cannot be taken. But for additional information about JCOME -- including copies of recent magazine ads and the MID-EAST REALITIES newsletter that can be sent directly to your fax machine -- call JCOME 24-hours daily to: (202) 362-JCOME (202) 362-5266 E-mail: jcome@mcimail.com FAX: (202) 362-6965 [JCOME on MCIMail] JCOME would be grateful to you for posting the installments of this series to computer bulletin boards, as well as posting hardcopies in public places, both on and off campus. BBS dial-in numbers can be found in the Usenet newsgroup alt.bbs.lists. Transcribed for JCOME by John DiNardo.