Cassandra Voices

Tag: Foucault

  • I Do Not Consent

    I didn’t particularly want to write this article.  I didn’t want to get involved in the whole online social media circus of opinion and rebuttal, triggering and offense. But I feel like I have something to say, and what I have to say is important. So I’ll speak my truth.

    About a month ago, I completely removed my attention from the hysterical world of 24-hour news cycles, social media, the conspiracy theories, the craziness, the arguments and rebuttals, the fear, projection and lashing out. So I stopped watching the news and left Facebook, and very liberating it was too.

    The collective process the world was going through as a result of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) was taking its toll on me. I had never experienced such fear and anger online before. People were literally lashing out, blurting their unprocessed emotions, fear and anger, all over social media, mirroring perhaps, conversations that were occurring in family homes all around the world.

    Instead, I put my energy into the world around me: learning new skills, fishing, growing food, renovating a cottage. Putting my energy and vision into creating a new reality. But something is making me speak out at this time.

    I would like to preface what I am saying by acknowledging that Covid-19 is a real threat that has caused great loss and suffering to many families all around the world.

    The collective hysteria resulting from it, however, is every bit as damaging as the virus itself.

    On the nature of fear

    My background is as an outdoor guide. I spent two decades guiding in remote and sometimes dangerous rivers and mountains on four continents. During that time I became very familiar with the nature of fear. A large part of the psychological aspect of guiding in adventurous environments involves managing people’s fears.

    Solo seakayaking around Ireland, 2014.

    One lesson I learnt beyond any doubt is that fear is contagious. Just like a virus. If one person in a group becomes fearful, it spreads like wildfire throughout the entire group, a legacy of our evolutionary heritage, and the fight or flight mechanism.

    What we have witnessed, in the past few months, is the entire human species in fight, flight or freeze mode. It is collective anxiety on a global scale, amplified by social media and hysterical media coverage.

    Our political leaders, for the most part doing their best and responding to an unprecedented situation, were pressured by a fearful media and hysterical public to do something, anything, and naturally they reacted from a place of fear.

    As anyone with a background in adventure sports will know, good decisions are never, ever made from a place of great fear or hysteria.

    The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti wrote: ‘Fear of any kind breeds illusion … where there is fear there is obviously no freedom … It makes one tell lies, it corrupts one in various ways, it makes the mind empty, shallow.’

    I am not suggesting that our government in Ireland is consciously part of some nefarious plot to undermine democracy. Not intentionally anyway. But democracy has nevertheless been undermined as a result of the hysterical response to Covid-19.

    In the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption said: ‘This is what a police state is like, it is a state in which a government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes’. He has called the lockdown ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’. When great legal minds are telling us that the rule of law is being undermined, we should listen.

    Our civil liberties and civil rights are not something that we be taken for granted. We forget now that Irish independence and the fight for freedom came at a high cost. ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’, is a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

    It does not matter whether you consider yourself to be politically on the left, centre, or the right, the erosion of civil liberties that has occurred in most Western democracies over the last few months is something that should concern you. if the there is one thing the history of the last century has taught us, it is that tyranny can take many forms.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    You may well have great trust in our current government. That is not the point. The point is that future governments may well use the same arguments to repress civil liberties. Consider the possibility of a less benign government with opposing political views to your own coming into power in the future, and using the precedents set at this time to undermine your civil liberties. We do not have to look far back in history to see that such events are very possible. Once a precedent is established, it is an easy path to follow.

    Over two thousand years ago, Plato warned of the dangers of tyranny arising from a fearful and chaotic democracy. The people, when afraid, beg for a strong leader to come to save them. Tyranny can arise, not from a despot seizing power, but through a fearful public demanding protection from an external threat. This threat is real, but is overblown: ‘This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.’

    Many other great political thinkers have expounded on the idea of the tyranny of the masses. The great Irish political theorist Edmund Burke, wrote in a 1790 letter that ‘The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny’.

    John Stuart Mill in his famous essay ‘On Liberty’ (1859) spoke of the need to protect against, ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling … as the majority opinion may not be the correct opinion.’

    We confront a dystopian nightmare of an Orwellian society of constant surveillance, with the government and/or corporations controlling what we can think, what we say, and how we act.

    Militaristic language has become all too commonplace, thereby justifying extreme wartime measures. We talk of ‘front line’ workers. Much as these amazing doctors and nurses are doing a wonderful job and should be commended, there is no ‘front line’.

    This is not a war. You cannot fight a war against a part of Nature. That is like fighting a war against yourself, a mass collective schizophrenia. This is part of the problem with our current rational-materialistic society: in our arrogance we believe ourselves to be somehow separate from Nature. This crisis is showing us clearly that we are not.

    The following liberties have been undermined since the start of the Covid-19 hysteria:

    1. The right to personal liberty and to protest. 

    Article 40.4 of the Irish constitution guarantees a right to liberty, while Article 40.6.1 says you have a right to assemble and to associate freely.

    The right to assemble and to protest is an essential part of any functioning democracy. Remember the mass civil unrest that was occurring in Hong Kong and France before Christmas? This has disappeared without a trace. Are we no longer allowed to march on the streets should the need to protest arise? What is now stopping future governments using the ‘health and safety’ of the public as an excuse to crack down on civil disobedience?

    1. The right to free speech. 

    One of the most important of our human rights, established as early as 1789 in Article XI of the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ – ‘The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely’. Article 40.6.1 of the Irish Constitution guarantees a right to express freely  your convictions and opinions .

    However, this right has come under attack in recent months, with censorship becoming very prevalent. Any questioning of the mainstream narrative quickly gets labelled ‘false news’ or a ‘conspiracy’ theory, thereby stifling debate and discussion. Who has the power to decide what is false news? Do you, or do I? Or does some unelected Youtube or Google content executive?

    The mainstream media and social media companies have unprecedented power to manipulate the narrative. Social media and search engine algorithms can effectively control what we read and see, and therefore control the reality we live in. Who decides what we should think, and who holds this absolute and terrifying power?

    I may not agree with what you are saying, but I absolutely respect your right to say it. Otherwise, one day, we may find that right has been taken from us.

    1. The right to privacy.

    Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.’

    The seemingly benign concept of using a ‘contact tracing’ app could easily be misused by governments to normalise mass surveillance of citizens at all times, in the interests of public safety. Keeping track at all times of where you go and who you are with, a smartphone becomes like a voluntary ankle tag. With smartphones becoming almost essential to function in society, this mass surveillance is constant.

    One of the very worst tendencies this crisis has brought out in people is of of neighbours spying on one another, settling old grievances by informing. Have people forgotten already how secret police, such as the Stasi in East Germany, controlled populations by encouraging this behaviour?

    The French philosopher Michel Foucault believed that: ‘the power of a goverment is co-extensive with its ability to surveil’,  and wrote about the symbolic prison of the Panopticon, in which prisoners never knew when they were being observed, so were obliged to be on their best behaviour at all times. We are living in a digital panopticon, and giving governments unprecedented powers of surveillence.

    Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.

    Moreover, with cash becoming redundant through this crisis, governments and corporations have acquired an even greater capacity to surveil, and therefore control, our lives. In the U.K., Derbyshire police used drones to film hillwalkers in a remote mountain area, while in California police fined surfers a $1000 for catching waves.

    Is this the kind of society you want to live in?

    1. The right to bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty.

    Are we going to give away our right to bodily autonomy to pharmaceutical companies, and the possibility of a mandatory vaccination programme?

    I am neither pro- nor anti- vaccination, but I believe that people should enjoy an absolute right to decide what is put into their bodies, freedom over their own body. A right to bodily integrity has been recognised by the courts as an unenumerated right, protected by the general guarantee of ‘personal rights’ contained under Article 40 of the Irish constitution.

    There is some disagreement in the scientific community around the safety of vaccines, with billions of dollars having been paid out in compensation by the Vaccine Injury Courts over the past thirty years, but any dissent of the mainstream Big Pharma narrative is brutally suppressed and attacked. In the Middle Ages, heretics were burnt at the stake for daring to question the mainstream version of reality. While they are not burnt at the stake today, anyone who questions the mainstream narrative is attacked, vilified, and discredited

    If anyone thinks these concerns over civil liberties far-fetched, I suggest you look at the situation in China at the moment, where the government has used the crisis to strengthen its grip on power, and to crack down on dissent.

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    What sort of world do we want to live in post-Covid-19?

    I would easily sacrifice an element of safety for my freedom. I want to live in a world where personal liberty and civil duties are both honoured and respected; where personal sovereignty is not given away to unelected global corporations; where political power remains vested in individuals and communities, and a central State does not have unchecked power to interfere in citizens’ lives. Where policing is by consent, and not by coercion and control. I want young children to be able to run freely in the outdoors without fear, or masks.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    I do not want to die anytime soon, but if I do, so be it. I have long accepted that one day I will die. I would much rather die a free man from Covid-19 than live in a dystopian surveillance society. What we are seeing is a global collective psychological process, the unconscious and unprocessed fear of death. By facing and accepting our own mortality, this fear dissipates.

    I do not want to live in a sanitised, risk-free, nanny-state surveillance world, where the government knows where I am at all times and controls what I think, what I can say, what I put in my body. I do not consent to this version of reality. I will not be part of it.

    The real front line is about personal power and self-sovereignty. Reclaiming our power from the unelected Silicon Valley AI/tech, media and pharmaceutical executives, who have acquired greater power over every aspect of our lives, with hardly any oversight.

    We need to come terms with the immense power that is accumulating in Google and Facebook to influence, manipulate and control what people think. Even that most Machiavellian of realpolitik bureaucrats Henry Kissinger recently wrote: ‘The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order. But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms’. He who controls the algorithms controls the world.

    This is not a world I want to create. I do not consent. For sure this crisis has brought out the very best in humanity, with neighbours helping one another, communities coming together, increasing food security and developing a great sense of solidarity. But we cannot, Pollyanna-like, ignore the potential for the slide into a dystopian surveillance society.

    What sort of society do we want our children and grandchildren to inhabit? This is the real front line. We have had a great opportunity for reflection and collective dreaming, for visioning and birthing a new society and new reality. The birthing process of the new world will be messy and painful, as births always are, but the baby will be born.

    We are not powerless. We have the power to rewrite the story and create a beautiful world for future generations. Let us make our collective vision a beautiful one.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

  • The Public Intellectual Series: Noam Chomsky

    They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.
    John Milton, ‘An Apology for Smectymnuus with the Reason of Church-Government’ (1642)

    Unfortunately I just missed out on meeting one of the totemic figures of our time in Noam Chomsky. In 1997, as a Boston-based Harvard student, I was taken to visit an unprepossessing office inside an apartment block, only to find the veteran M.I.T. professor and author had left the building.

    What remains to be said about the darling of the radical anti-imperialist left?

    In my previous account of Michel Foucault, I touched on Chomsky’s revulsion towards post-modernism and moral relativism, and his acute anticipation of the post-truth zeitgeist. He was the first I think to point out that Jacques-the-lad-poseurs such as Derrida and Lacan were saying little of substance, and what they were holding forth on was nonsense on stilts.

    Chomsky anticipated how post-modernist mumbo-jumbo would be appropriated by neo-conservatives to sow a culture of disinformation. Perhaps a scientific background in formal linguistics armed him with the rigour to cut through the morass. He has frequently spoken of his dislike of deceit, and adherence to Cartesian common sense.

    Chomsky shares with George Orwell – another of our public intellectual subject-matters – a commitment to the truth and an almost mystic-like perception of how propaganda operates. This leads him into a degree of bemusement at popular culture that may come across as elitist. But he understands how a spectator democracy and a free-fall in journalistic standards has lead to Populist demagogues.

    Manufacturing Consent

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuwmWnphqII

    The effectiveness of political propaganda is managed by hegemonic media and other vectors of public opinion, which undermine democracy and promote a corporatocracy. This brought us Donald Trump rather than Bernie Sanders.

    It is what Chomsky has termed Manufacturing Consent, borrowing a term from Walter Lippmann, whose Public Opinion (1921), argued for democratic control through a specialised class or cool observers to control the agendas, manipulating public opinion by means of clever illusions and simplification.

    Chomsky borrows this insight to demonstrate how the media works through diversion and dumbing down. Popular energy is dissipated and voters infantilised.

    Interestingly, a recent highly critical account by Chris Knight called Decoding Chomsky (2016) points out that for much if not all of his career Chomsky’s science, eminently debatable, has been totally disconnected from his political engagement.

    From the outset of his career he has effectively relied on the promotion and funding of the military industrial complex, through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).

    Why? Well it seems they quite like the idea of an anti-establishment token radical on their payroll. It gives them a degree of legitimacy, at least as long as his voice is not heard too widely. Indeed, in other countries he might be regarded as a class traitor.

    Moreover, his ground breaking hypothesis of human beings possessing an innate syntactical language of deep structure, contrary to the claims of behaviourism assisted the Pentagon in an ultimately fruitless search for a computer encoded Esperanto. They were seeking a common dumbed down language that could be used for commercial and corporate purposes: a precursor to the patois of social media perhaps.

    It is important to recall that as an American academic he has had to navigate a snake pit of careerist in order to make his mark. One should recognise the constraints of working within a uniformly commercial culture that encompasses the universities.

    Knight maintains that psychologically his ab initio common-language-from-nowhere linguistic theory, and advocacy, promoted isolation, and led to a form of cognitive dissonance that influenced his political beliefs. In effect, Knight alleges, he became a neurotic at odds with the rest of society. The accusation thus is one of hypocrisy, or like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, he has been living an alternative life.

    A Picture of Dorian Gray

    Knight also maintains that when his critics maul his ideas on linguistics he reverts to ad hominem tactics, dogmatism, with counter evidence dismissed in favour of his own mystical vision, which is precisely the kind of self-evident-genius-argument I despise.

    So I am certainly not fully persuaded by his linguistic theories but convinced indeed, unlike Knight, that the institutional support has brought him unique intellectual influence and responsibility – perhaps manipulated for his own ends – but for the good of humanity: as Chomsky is a principled man.

    The Public Intellectual

    One of his very early pieces, much modified, is brilliantly written on a theme close to my heart: the responsibility of the public intellectual.

    Chomsky draws a clear distinction between the ever more prevalent academics who sing for their suppers, and parrot for promotion, and those who take the difficult path of what Albert Camus would call engagement.

    Today, value-orientated intellectuals are likely to be dismissed as troublemakers in our short term universe of disposability. The generalist is lost in the mix.

    Chomsky in fact is very conscious of how, ever since Jimmy Carter, right-wing, Christian conservatives in America have warned against the radicalisation of the young, and are now hell bent on purging radical thinkers from citadels of learning.

    The universities and the media engage in self-censorship to suit corporate paymasters. The polite-paper-paradigm meets with incredulity at the nuclear explosion of true dissidence. I discovered this under martial law-like conditions when giving a Rule of Law paper in Trinity College Dublin. On offering robust opinions I was told there would be no circulation of the paper, and another invitation was unlikely.

    In Manufacturing Consent (1988), Chomsky demonstrates how market forces and the neo-liberal agenda compel colleges and the media to select topics within defined parameters. This restricts debate and brings the nonsense of ‘balanced’ coverage, and the filtering of information with an over-emphasis on tone. Appropriate tone. Authorities fear upsetting corporate sponsors, leading to the rule of political correctness by the banal.

    More to the point, Chomsky is attuned to the independent stance of public intellectualism, which we have all but lost.

    Henry Kissinger

    Chomsky has also written about Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, a dangerous war criminal still in our midst, and how he exterminated or was complicit in the extermination of East Timor, which was absorbed into Indonesia during the American-backed Suharto dictatorship, with tremendous loss of life and Crimes Against Humanity.

    Still in our midst. Henry Kissinger.

    In the documentary Manufacturing Consent, like George Orwell, Chomsky is attentive to the misuse of language to justify atrocities. Thus in East Timor the invasion was code-named Operation Clean Sweep. More sotto voce language distortions to justify ethnic-cleansing, itself a term sanitising Genocide that only came into being during the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s.

    The book Manufacturing Consent sets out clearly how American foreign policy, from Vietnam to the Bush wars, moulded the message and demonised the Other. Even if we are wrong we are right, and embedded reporters will exonerate any wrongdoing. If, like the claims of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the truth is damaging, we ignore it.

    Thus a world is divided into worthy and unworthy, with the lenses of the powerful never turned on themselves. Enemies are reduced to vermin to be exterminated, and democratically elected socialists like Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 are, if necessary, removed from office. That’s because democratic socialism is contrary to American values. Better to have a son of a bitch, so long as he’s our son of a bitch. If our boys are engaged in terrorism, it is not really terrorism. If we murder vast numbers of civilians it is hardly Genocide.

    As Chomsky reminds us, democracy has to be subverted to purge the average citizen of consciousness, and the critical faculties necessary for it to function.

    ‘Socialism is contrary to American values.’

    Hegemony and Survival

    Another crucial text, Hegemony and Survival (2003) demonstrates how the elite regard democracy as, in effect, a spectator democracy. To paraphrase Alexander Hamilton, the ordinary person must be deemed irresponsible and kept within strict confines. He should not be allowed to vote in his interests, or even consider them.

    From Vietnam to the present day U.S. Imperialism has dismissed unworthy races. Those who are not a part of the twenty percent who control the planet are to be excluded and disempowered. A culture of dissent is expurgated.

    In Hegemony and Survival he sees clearly the beginning of what Stieglitz called The Great Divide (2017), and development of a lunatic neo-liberal hegemony. That divide now has led to the destruction of the middle class, and the cartelisation of wealth into ever decreasing hands

    The corporations control the press, leading to self-interested non-reportage by job preservers, reporting beyond the neo-liberal straightjacket is not permitted. The Irish Times in Dublin is a totemic exemplar of the decline of independent media.

    As he mentions in his book on propaganda Media Control (2002) state propaganda is used and supported by the educated classes in order to exclude those less fortunate from the discussion. The responsible people, which Yannis Varoufakis would call the Adults in the Room, exclude the herd from infecting their decision-making. Thus people are atomised, segregated and alone. Scholarship becomes conformist and lies beget and compound lies. Scholars who show an independence of spirit are de-frocked.

    That which the media excludes is dictated by corporate ownership and advertising paymasters, bringing stories that focus on less central issues, or infomercials masquerading as news.

    Thus the thinking public á la Cambridge Analytica is fed disinformation, dictating and influencing popular misconceptions, problems and prejudices.

    Ten facts about media control

    Chomsky summarises the ten facts of media control which I further synopsis:.

    1. Distraction: compel the public to focus on irrelevance and chatter in our Brave New World. Overload them with nonsense. Press control from Murdoch to social media augments this.
    2. Generate Problems that do not exist and do not need solving: Bail out the banks to enforce fiscal stabilisation and impose austerity on those who have no responsibility for the mess. Reinforce the message, TINA (there is no alternative) but fiscal stabilisation.
    3. Gradualism: Brexit is likely to lead to the slow death of the NHS. First deny it to non-nationals, then to the socialists… Once the British public is conditioned to the idea, pull the plug out altogether and fully privatise.
    4. It will be better in the long run if you take your medicine now. The short sharp shock of austerity. No it will not.
    5. Kill people’s critical faculties and infantalise them. The Greeks and Irish are merely children anyway. Appropriate adults in the room, in the form of the IMF, have arrived to tell you what to do.
    6. Appeal to Emotion, frenzy, hysteria and not rationality. Thus our world is being torn apart by mob orators pulling at the heartstrings.
    7. Disinform and create a sideshow. The public are being fattened up by bread and seduced by circuses of the absurd, causing us to lose sight of the real point.
    8. Pander to bland consumerism. Assure people constantly that they have never had it so good. Brexit will create unlimited prosperity. Drug people with disinformation like soma from A Brave New World.
    9. If we have acted criminally and are powerful then it is your fault and your responsibility. You are derelict because we are criminals, but we never acknowledge that.
    10. Play the person not the ideas. Then if the person is troublesome go after their relationship structure, or just make them disappear.

    Chomsky cuts against the salon culture of the Enlightenment, championed by Jürgen Habermas. The challenge lies in counteracting the disconnected memes and silo bubbles of self-interest that the world’s elite direct at us.

    Data retention

    Orwell’s idea of double speak from Nineteen-Eighty-Four dovetails with Chomsky’s significant observation that it is much more important to have less data, but to have greater understanding or indeed comprehension of what we do hold on to.

    That requirement for nuance, judgement and perspective is dissipating rapidly. We are addicted to useless information and data retention, not comprehension or understanding. We are now bombarded with a deluge of superfluous information by social media. More to the point the useless data and bricolage condition our judgment, as it must in order to survive.

    How many now join up the dots as Chomsky has and bring them into common sense utterance in simple plain speech and with social engagement? Very few. Very few from the academic community at least. Chomsky is right that the time servers and corporate drones of academia are deliberately or intellectually missing the Big Picture.

    One point he has not addressed is how the current neo-liberal rewarping of human identity is creating social atomisation and political disconnection. We are now so embroiled in what we do that we hardly ever question it or fully understand the machine behind it. We no longer have time to consider what we are doing.

    Chomsky quotes Robert McNamara in Manufacturing Consent to the effect that all the power brokers are interested in is quiescent serfs dedicated to personal wealth maximisation, not a culture of dissent.

    McNamara, a brilliant but non-deviant character, was an ultra-competitive and narrow-minded technocrat which made him complicit in the carpet bombing of Tokyo and the Vietnam war. He even acknowledges that had he been on the losing side he could have been prosecuted for war crimes. If only McNamara had slightly wilder college days.

    So the masses are duped by propaganda and caught by a Social Darwinist cult that Chomsky despises. Paradoxically, Chomsky is himself a survivor in that world, and has had to make his compromises, as we all do. ‘You’re going to have to serve somebody,’ as Bob Dylan sang.

    Optimism Over Despair

    Nonetheless, as Chomsky argues in his new book, we need Optimism Over Despair (2017), perhaps a social-democratic New Deal, checking unbridled capitalism.

    As creatures of bounded rationality in an increasingly over-specialised world the Big Picture is a luxury perhaps, reserved for a corporate- and military-funded former M.I.T. Professor. He now operates from a salubrious post-retirement position in Arizona – the greatest quality of life retirement home in America – which is not to be in the least dismissive of Chomsky’s staggering achievements.

    Chomsky rightly regards the U.S. as a terror state that acts without restraint, while accusing others of the same crimes. Thus the labels of terrorism and counter-terrorism conceal a multitude of agendas and doublespeak, while permitting the basest acts.

    I am unconvinced by the evidence for a common nascent language of universal and deep structure. Chomsky has never explained adequately the idea of recursion, a kind of infinity of deep structure, and thus the linguistic ideas appear counter-intuitive and perhaps fundamentally incorrect. But I claim no expertise in this domain. Nonetheless, I cling to the belief that there is a common universal of pragmatic compunction, though varying in context and time.

    Of course none of that is to gainsay or contradict the clear speech of his inter-subjective and all-encompassing journalism and political tracts, for which he deserves great praise.

    Responding to Chomsky

    Here I summarise the injunctions I have gleaned from Chomsky’s work:

    • Think independently and do not buy into the mass media consensus. Remain acutely vigilant to doublespeak technobabble. Hearing euphemisms such as ‘politically impossible,’ ‘fiscal stabilisation,’ ‘military intelligence’ or ‘known unknowns’ should sound off alarm bells.
    • Question how implausible nonsense is considerable acceptable, and campaign, if at all possible, for freedom and justice.
    • Assert the importance of historical memory, as Milan Kundera emphasised. In laughter all evil is compacted as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. If we fail to remember, we’re sure to repeat the same obscenities.
    • Oppose fascism in all its current incarnations, including corporate fascism. Do not sympathise with your captors or enemies.
    • Recognise true hypocrisy for what it is. The hypocrite is someone who applies to others standards they refuse to apply to themselves, of which American foreign policy is a paradigmatic case. Remain flexible and non-puritanical however.
    • Understand that the definition of terrorism is manufactured by a terrorist corporate and state elite. Just as the French tortured in Algeria, the Americans did the same in Guantanamo Bay. Yet both claimed the high moral ground. Terrorism is only what they do to us.
    • Resist the rise of moral relativism, which is part of a triage of evil (joining post-truth and neo-liberalism) that Chomsky identifies in the U.S. Republican Party, which he has singled out as the most dangerous political organisation on Planet Earth.
    • Acknowledge how the cost-benefit analysis of neo-liberalism is turning us into homo economicus, making us lose compassion for one another, besides generating environmental catastrophes.
    • Embrace the educational tools necessary to defend oneself, and develop communities of resistance within rapidly atomising societies.
    Interrogation carried out in Guantanamo Bay.

    *******

    Perhaps the most disturbing idea that comes through in Knight’s book about Chomsky does not apply to him directly, but relates to how the political ground has moved so far to the right that Richard Nixon, who supported environmental initiatives, Keynesian economics and state-funded medicine, might now be labelled a Communist.

    If Chomsky manipulated the corporatocracy to achieve and advocate his political views I would tend to applaud rather than condemn him. To penetrate the orifices of the establishment and to subvert from within is surely a great achievement in itself. It’s always better to be pissing out than pissing in, for as long as you can anyway.