From: "Rene G. Rodriguez" <rene@CS.RICE.EDU>
Subject: Chomsky parte 2
Reply-To: Multiple recipients of list MEXICO-L <MEXICO-L@TECMTYVM.BITNET>
Organization: Rice University
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 23:51:01 GMT

|> Part 2, Chomsky on the New World Order, Central America,
|>  and the Middle East (continued)
|>
|>
|>
|> *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
|>                         (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
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|>
|>                  The Jewish Committee on the Middle East
|>                              P.O. Box 18367
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|>
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|>
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|>                 Transcribed for JCOME by John DiNardo.
|>
|>
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