The threat of a good example
On 19 December 2006, the award-winning news program Democracy Now! ran a piece on Noam Chomsky entitled “From Bolivia to Baghdad: Noam Chomsky on Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation”. (Noam Chomsky is an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the foremost critics of US foreign policy. The New York Times has described Chomsky as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”, and in 2006 he was voted the world’s number one intellectual in a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. Chomsky is also an early signatory of Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning, and we are, well, big fans of him.)
Chomsky at the World Social Forum (Porto Alegre) in 2003
The piece mainly comprises of an excerpt of a talk Chomsky gave at an event sponsored by Massachusetts Global Action the weekend previous. He spoke about recent elections in Latin America which brought leftist governments to power that are challenging US foreign policy. Chomsky said: “This is the first time since the Spanish conquests, 500 years, that there has been real moves towards integration in South America. The countries have been very separated from one another. And integration is going to be a prerequisite for authentic independence. I mean, there have been - I’m sure you know - attempts at independence, but they’ve been crushed, often very violently, partly because of lack of regional support, because there was very little regional cooperation, so you can pick them off one by one.”
From our point of view in terms of the international campaign we are planning to run in support of Declan’s petition to the UN, we find something else Chomsky said on Latin America particularly revealing: “[A] move towards integration, independence and authentic democracy with mass popular movements and participation and so on, all extremely important, but also along with it goes a decline in the methods of domination and control. I mean, the US has dominated the region for a long time with two major methods: one of them, violence, and the other, economic strangulation, economic controls. And both of those methods are declining in efficacy.”
In one of his books, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky writes that no country is exempt from US intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it’s the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. There is a reason for that, he says. “The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example.” On the politics of Noam Chomsky, Wikipedia says:
His conclusion is that a consistent part of the United States' foreign policy is based on stemming the "threat of a good example." This 'threat' refers to the possibility that a country could successfully develop outside the US managed global system, thus presenting a model for other countries, including countries in which the United States does have strong economic interests. This, Chomsky says, has prompted the United States to repeatedly intervene to quell "independent development, regardless of ideology" in regions of the world where it has little economic or safety interests. In one of his works, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky argues that this particular explanation accounts in part for the United States' interventions in Guatemala, Laos, Nicaragua, and Grenada, countries that pose little or no military threat to the US and have few economic resources that could be exploited by US business interests.
The similarities in the campaign against Declan and I are striking. Take violence: what can beat an ongoing attempt to move us out of the porch we sleep in at night when we have been sleeping there for over a year and a half (see previous blog for Declan’s letter to the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis)? On economic strangulation, I would need a weekend to enumerate all the examples. But just a few. I have been wearing the same clothes for ages because every time I ask for something in the Catholic Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre I seldom get it; last Sunday, in the Manna Centre (whose building is provided rent-free by the Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark), I was told the clothes room was closed: I am only given a couple of minutes, every two Sundays, to find a maximum of three items from a jumble of second-hand clothes. From 10 January to Easter (when a guy gave me £10) I had no choice but to go into the local train station and ask people for some change because of all the problems we were having - and still have - trying to sell The Big issue, a magazine sold by homeless people on registered street pitches. My daily food is two Weetabix and two grated-cheese sandwiches, one is Declan’s, which I get at the Dellow. I also cut my own hair so at least I can hide it underneath a cap – the nuns of the Dellow haven’t brought in a hairdresser since December.
Declan’s examples, well, his two best … He walks a round trip of two hours to the Manna Centre every weekday to be guaranteed a bite to eat for lunch – although he frequently gets more than just food: on Sunday, he got kicked under the table not by one, but two Poles. And he has had so many problems with homeless in the Dellow’s washroom that he shaves in a local park every weekday before 6.00am (see blog of 22 April “Letter to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor”), but that would be an example of violence, I suppose.
Undoubtedly it is hard; but when you live in Siberia, you get used to the weather.
