John Pilger Interviews Noam Chomsky - 25 Nov 1992

Running Time: 22min 39sec
Date:1992
Video Codec: MPEC-4, 320:240 (4:3), 1008kbps, 23,9 fps
Audio Codec: mp3, stero, 96 kbps

The beginning of the interview is missing, but here is a transcript of the missing part !!!

PILGER: Noam Chomsky, there seems to be two of you. The scientist and rationalist on the one hand, and the prophet on the other, a man of great passion and anger. What above all has fuelled this? CHOMSKY: Well, I think the passion and anger, which is certainly real, is fuelled simply by looking at the world. Ah my earliest childhood memories from the 1930s include er people coming to the door trying to sell rags to try to survive, scenes of police breaking up, violently breaking up, textile strikes in the city where I live, and on right up to the present, I mean the last years have been years of Pol Pot style massacres orchestrated by the United States in central America and Guatemala to a war against the church and other people trying to organise poor people. There's nowhere you can look and er if if unless your eyes are blinded and not be aroused to er er passion and anger PILGER: Is that why you said that er 'I always feel on the side of the loser'? CHOMSKY: Er well, it turns out that the people at the wrong end of the guns are usually the losers. And they're the people who if we're even minimally serious we ought to be trying to help er and at least I try, with whatever success, to be on the side of the people who are likely to be the potential losers. Now of course they don't lose everything, there are little gains here and there, and over the years over the centuries, many of these gains have amounted to quite a bit. But er the brutality and the violence and the suffering are enormous. And will remain so as long as disparities of power remain. PILGER: How much of this has come from your childhood? Because although you had a Jewish upbringing, you grew up in Philadelphia before the second world war, in a predominantly Irish and German neighbourhood, didn't you. CHOMSKY: We happened to be the only Jewish family in an Irish and German Catholic neighbourhood, which were quite pro-Nazi. In fact as late as the fall of Paris I remember celebrations, and my brother and I knew we had to take certain paths to the bus to survive, and that sort of thing PILGER: It was a pro-Nazi celebration in the neighbourhood? CHOMSKY: Oh yes. It was an area of German-American Bund. [See definition in Websters] But that's not so unusual, incidentally. In fact, the State Department, as late as 1937, in internal communications which have since been released, the State Department was describing Fascism as 'a natural response, an understandable response, of the better classes in Germany to the severe threat posed by the working classes and Bolsheviks' and so on. In fact Hitler was described as a moderate. The US was openly pro-Mussolini; Mussolini was 'that admirable Italian gentleman' as Franklin Roosevelt called him, and that went on right into the late 30s. So the fact that there were popular support for the Nazis was not anything terribly surprising PILGER: But your own er circle was both intensely Jewish and intensely political. Could you give me an.. CHOMSKY: Well, my immediate background was more or less an immigrant ghetto, a Jewish ghetto transplanted from Eastern Europe -- Hebrew School, Hebrew teaching, Hebrew culture and so on, er again, not unusual. And er the slightly broader family background did include something which was of enormous importance for me; it was in New York, not very far away, working-class most of those days, mostly unemployed, very vibrant working class culture which existed at the time. Many of the people had little or no formal education, but they were very cultivated and educated, including high culture, or involved in political movements, typically of the left, many of them had already passed through the standard Leninist-Marxist movements and were on the left of that, and it was just an exciting, lively, intellectual culture that I was drawn to very young, as soon as you know I was waking up more or less and er it had a tremendous impact PILGER: Of course, many of them though, went on to renounce their their socialism, their Marxism, even their Stalinism CHOMSKY: Stalinism went fast. I mean I was always anti-Stalinist; that happened very early, I'd say by the time I was ten years old, partly because of an interest in the Spanish Civil War in the late 30s. It was quite clear, even not knowing much, that something was wrong with the standard picture, er and I did, by the time I was twelve or thirteen I was haunting anarchist bookstores in New York and so on, picking up pamphlets, and talking to people who were happy to talk to some young feller who walked around, and could see that the Spanish Civil war was -- in fact, it was like, as I have later learned, all civil wars are, it was tripartite.


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