[Peace-discuss] What needs to be said...

[C. G. Estabrook]

John W. wrote:
> You mean like the old Soviet Union, Mort?  The world was in better shape 
> during the Cold War? Well, not to worry.  There'll be a countervailing power
> soon enough. It'll be great.  Arguably China already is that countervailing
> power. Our "leaders" just haven't quite figured it out yet.

...You read the most respectable journal in the world, I suppose, the Journal of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and you find leading strategic
analysts, John Steinbrunner and Nancy Gallagher, a couple of years ago, warning
that the Bush administration's aggressive militarization is leading to what they
call "ultimate doom." Of course, there is going to be a reaction to it. You
threaten people with destruction, they are going to react. These analysts call
on peace-loving nations to counter Bush's aggressive militarism. They hope that
China will lead peace-loving nations to counter U.S. aggressiveness. It's a
pretty remarkable comment on the impossibility of achieving democracy in the
United States. Again, the logic is pretty elementary. Steinbrunner and Gallagher
are assuming that the United States cannot be a democratic society; it's not one
of the options, so therefore we hope that maybe China will do something.

...I will just finish with a word from George Orwell. In the introduction to
Animal Farm he said, England is a free society, but it's not very different from
the totalitarian monster I have been describing. He says in England unpopular
ideas can be suppressed without the use of force ... He says, one reason is the
press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to
be expressed. And the second reason -- and I think a more important one -- is a
good education. If you have gone to the best schools and graduated from Oxford
and Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled in you the understanding that there
are certain things it would not do to say; actually, it would not do to think.
That is the primary way to prevent unpopular ideas from being expressed.

The ideas of the overwhelming majority of the population, who don't attend
Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge, enable them to react like human
beings, as they often do. There is a lesson there for activists.

--from <http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20080101.htm>