Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: USA: cosa vuole veramente lo "Zio Sam"....

un estratto da un convegno di Noam Chomsky, il più importante
linguista di questo secolo, professore al MIT di Boston
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Globally the Cold War meant a policy of intervention around the world
to ensure that the South would remain in its essentially service role.
However, I think one can also say that the Cold War was an example of
the North-South conflict. So what was the Cold War about, what was the
conflict between the USSR and the US about?
In the early part of the 20th century, Eastern Europe was as
impoverished as the Third World is today. In fact it was Europe's own
Third World. And that goes back for centuries. Actually it goes back
to when Eastern Europe and Western Europe began to separate, along a
fault line running right through Germany during the 15th century, with
the West beginning to develop and the East becoming an increasingly
impoverished service area, providing resources and raw materials, and
later on cheap labour and market investment opportunities, and, in the
more recent period, a place to export pollution. The usual Third World
amenities. And when there was some industrialisation in Russia, it was
overwhelmingly based on Western capital. The typical Third World
pattern. Well into the 20th century, if you look at the relative
wealth of East and West Europe, the East was actually declining
relative to the West.
Russia was a slightly unusual part of the Third World. It wanted
respect on a bigger scale, and although it was a deeply impoverished
peasant society, it had a powerful military in the 18th and l9th
centuries.
The logic of the North-South relationship was very clear. The Third
World is to play a service role, which means that any attempt towards
independent development must be crushed. The British pioneered this in
India; India had to be de-industrialised and ruralised, while Britain
developed.
When the US took over global leadership in 1945, the policy became
quite explicit. The documentary record from the time that John's
quoting, in the 1940s, shows that the basic principle is that the US
must prevent what is variously called radical nationalism, independent
nationalism or economic nationalism. Various names for it, but it
always means the same thing: Efforts to strike an independent course.
The secret documents explain that the main US interests are threatened
by nationalist regimes which are responsive to pressures from their
own populations for improvement of low living standards and production
for domestic use. That's got be stopped because we had the right to
the resources, not they. We have to protect "our" resources.
The place where the US was really able to impose this resolve was
Latin America; they had total control in the region after the Second
World War. The US was finally able to kick Britain and France out of
Latin America and took it over. Then it had to struggle against what
was called the philosophy of the new nationalism - which was sweeping
Latin America - the belief, the State Department explained in their
secret documents, that the first, the prime beneficiaries of a
country's resources should be the people of that country, and that
these resources should be used for development and equal distribution.
Well, that had to be stopped because the prime beneficiaries of the
economies of the South were defined as the investors, the rich
countries.
The Russian-Western relationship was exactly the same. The Bolshevik
takeover was an effort by a Third World country to break out of the
pattern of being a service area for Western power, and that could not
be permitted.
Independent nationalism is unacceptable to the West, no matter where
it is, and it has to be driven back into subordination. In the case of
Grenada, you can do it in a weekend; in the case of the Soviet Union
it may take 70 years. But these are matters of scale, the logic is
essentially the same.
There is a second point that should be mentioned: there is something
even worse than the threat of independent nationalism, and that's the
threat of it being successful. There's a technical term for this -
it's called the rotten apple. A rotten apple might spoil the barrel.
Henry Kissinger preferred to call it a virus that might infect other
regions. So, for example, Kissinger, when he was working to overthrow
the Salvador Allende regime in Chile, warned that Chile was a virus
that might infect other countries as far afield as Southern Italy.
Kissinger understood that the Chilean army was not going to land in
Rome. What he meant was straightforward: the threat that some kind of
democratic socialism might succeed in a period when Communism was
spreading - it might give other countries the idea that they could do
the same thing. So that's what's called being a rotten apple or a
virus - and if you look at the record of intervention, you discover
that intervention is consistently aimed with the greatest harshness at
what Oxfam once called the threat of a good example, the threat that a
radical experiment might work.
Russia was instantly recognised to be a virus, that is, it was a model
that others might imitate, not only in the Third World, but even at
home, as for example, when striking Welsh miners appealed to the
Russian model right away. This goes right up to the 1960s, with Harold
Macmillan warning John F Kennedy that the Soviet development model
might succeed, and in that case would really be dangerous. Not only
because that huge part of the world would be "lost", but because
others nearer home might try to emulate it. So here you have a huge
rotten apple, massive and greater than all the other rotten apples,
which provided a model that others might want to follow.
That in essence is the whole North-South conflict, which takes on a
life of its own in this case for all kinds of reasons, but the basic
structure goes back as far as the British conquest of India, back
further if you want to push it, but in India it becomes a major issue
and goes right up to the present. And with the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989, Eastern Europe is actually being driven right back to Third
World status, so it too is now subject to structural adjustment - and
reverts to the standard Third World structure of having a very narrow
sector of extreme wealth and privilege and a huge mass of really badly
suffering people.
And the reason why in my opinion nothing changed at the end of the
Cold War is that the policies continue exactly as before. As John
mentioned, despite the changes in propaganda and pretexts, nothing
really changes - it goes on exactly as before. The result of victory
in the Cold War is that the traditional European Third World is now a
genuine Third World once more, and can be integrated as such into the
global economy.
This offers new weapons against people in the West. Just as in the
past, General Motors, say, could switch production to northern Mexico
to undermine wages and working conditions for US workers, now General
Motors has put factories in Poland or Hungary where they can get
workers for a fraction of the cost of what the business press calls
the "pampered" West European workers with their "luxurious
lifestyles", which can now be attacked.
And here we have another generalisation: We are now moving into an era
in which we go beyond the North-South conflict in the traditional
sense - rather it's being completely internationalised. It's becoming
possible to establish a Third World model inside the wealthy countries
themselves. That's one of the effects of an international economy. And
you can see it most strikingly in the US and Britain, which are taking
on distinctly Third World aspects, with a growing gap between a small
sector of the wealthy and a big mass of "superfluous" people. The
proportions are quite different in countries such as the US and
Brazil, but the structure is similar. If you look at the gap between
rich and poor, country by country, United Nations statistics show the
gap between the top 20 per cent of countries and the bottom 20 per
cent in terms of wealth approximately doubled between 1960 and 1990,
from 30 to 1 to 60 to 1. On the other hand, if you take the world's
population and you take the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per
cent, the gap increased even further. In fact it's now about 140 to 1
between the top 20 per cent across the world and the bottom 20 per
cent across the world.
The US is sometimes described as a declining imperial power, which is
true if you consider the US as defined by its borders. On the other
hand, if you take corporations based in the US, it's not true at all.
The US Congress has recently started re-estimating and re-analysing
the trade balance, and if you consider the trade balance to be
something defined by the US's geographical borders, then there is a
huge trade deficit. But if you define the trade balance as production
by US corporations no matter where they happen to be, and their
exports, you end up with a favourable trade balance. In fact, the
share of manufacturing production by US based corporations is actually
increasing. That's one aspect of the generalisation of the Third World
model.
A good way of finding out who won a war, who lost a war, and what the
war was about, is to ask who's cheering and who's depressed after it's
over - this can give you interesting answers. So, for example, if you
ask that question about the Second World War, you find out that the
winners were the Nazis, the German industrialists who had supported
Hitler, the Italian Fascists and the war criminals that were sent off
to South America - they were all cheering at the end of the war. The
losers of the war were the anti-fascist Resistance, who were crushed
all over the world. Either they were massacred like in Greece or South
Korea, or just crushed like in Italy and France. That's the winners
and losers. That tells you partly what the war was about.
Now let's take the Cold War: Who's cheering and who's depressed? Let's
take the East first. The people who are cheering are the former
Communist Party bureaucracy who are now the capitalist entrepreneurs,
rich beyond their wildest dreams, linked to Western capital, as in the
traditional Third World model, and the new Mafia. They won the Cold
War. The people of East Europe obviously lost the Cold War; they did
succeed in overthrowing Soviet tyranny, which is a gain, but beyond
that they've lost - they're in miserable shape and declining further.
If you move to the West, who won and who lost? Well, the investors in
General Motors certainly won. They now have this new Third World open
again to exploitation - and they can use it against their own working
classes. On the other hand, the workers in GM certainly didn't win,
they lost. They lost the Cold War, because now there's another way to
exploit them and oppress them and they're suffering from it. It's the
same in England, and in the rest of Europe. The winners and the losers
tell you a lot about what the Cold War was about.
Yes, of course, everything goes on as before with regard to the
North-South conflict, but we have a new phenomenon, the
internationalisation of the economy, which is spreading the Third
World model to the industrial societies, offering ways to accelerate
production by opening up new areas of exploitation that can be used
and are being used to sharpen divisions and to increase domination. So
it's the end of one Cold War, but just another stage in the conflict
that began with the European conquests of the Third World 500 years
ago.

linguista di questo secolo, professore al MIT di Boston
Ahhhhh, ma allora sei Torrieri! ;-)
Ciao George!
TC

Ciao George!
MAGARI fossi Torrieri... purtroppo invece no...
Torrieri è MEGLIO di me!
:o)
ciao

ciao
Buon Natale, George ;-)

Buon Natale, George ;-)
ti GARANTISCO che non sono Torrieri...
davvero!

...

OK...OK...scusa...ritiro il complimento... ;-)

>linguista di questo secolo, professore al MIT di Boston
Ho sentito in TV una lunghissima intervista a Noam Chomsky
sull'intelligenza umana ed animale, cose simili.
Mai sentite tante stronzate tutte insieme!
Mi sono chiesto perché è tanto famoso questo tizio.
Ah, un'altra volta l'ho sentito dissertare di altro,
ma sempre stronzate erano.

ma sempre stronzate erano.
Prova a guardare Alvaro Vitali, la prossima volta. Mai sentito parlare
di "affinità elettive"?

Globally the Cold War meant a policy of intervention around the world
....
[taglio]
ti costerebbe molto scrivere una sintesi in italiano?
Infinitamente grazie,
Massimo

ma sempre stronzate erano.
Evidentemente sa vendersi. Come il Kissinger dei tempi
d'oro, un vuoto trombone che riusciva a spacciarsi per
intelligentone.

intelligentone.
La vostra miseria umana, morale e culturale è sotto gli occhi di
tutti. Non sapete nemmeno chi è Chomsky e blaterate... tra l'altro
l'uso del "sapersi vendere" per un critico della società dei consumi è
proprio quanto di più inappropriato ci possa essere. Piuttosto usatelo
per gli zeloti di PROGRAMMA ITALIA e per tutto il vostro sottobosco
umano.

...

Noi viviamo nella realtà non abbiamo studiato come tù a scuola di partito il
MARXISMO, LENINISMO vogliamo solo la DEMOCRAZIA
saluti GIANC fiorano modenese

di "affinità elettive"?
In effetti secondo me Alvaro Vitali doce cose molto meno
banali di Chomsky, che per lo più si limita a dire che
l'acqua è bagnata e che questa è una sua scoperta.

umano.
Ma se quello è il sottobosco tu e Chomsky pensate evidentemente
di far parte del sovrabosco, di essere al di sopra degli altri.
Il che, se permetti, fa solamente ridere.

intelligentone.
Evidentemente. Insomma sono veramente rimasto sconvolto
dall'insieme di asserzioni sull'intelligenza che
dimostravano che Chomsky a) non aveva la minima idea
degli ultimi sviluppi in questo campo, b) ripeteva
banalità che mi sarei aspettato da uno studente 
liceale, e non di quelli più svegli c) mostrava
una incredibile sicumera nei punti a) e b).
Fate voi, che vi devo dire.

l'acqua è bagnata e che questa è una sua scoperta.
Allora guardati Vitali e resta con Vitali