[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on real grievances

[C. G. Estabrook]

["...there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the 
left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at 
those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real 
grievances."]


When I go home tonight I'll have 15 letters today from mostly young kids who 
don't like what's going on and want to do something about it, and [they ask me] 
if I can give them some advice as to what they should do, or can I tell them 
what to read or something. It doesn't work like that. I mean, everything depends 
very much on who you are, what your values are, what your commitments are, what 
circumstances you live in and what options you're willing to undertake, and that 
determines what you ought to be doing. There are some very general ideas that 
people can keep in mind; they're kind of truisms. It's only worth mentioning 
them because they're always denied.

First of all, don't believe anything you hear from power systems. So if Obama or 
the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they're doing this, that, or 
the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which it often is. 
You have to rely on yourself and your associates —- gifts don't come from above; 
you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and you win by struggle, and 
that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options and the 
circumstances, and then you can do a lot.

So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's 
very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right 
reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these 
are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of 
interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just 
enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. 
I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really 
aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a 
god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. 
I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they 
are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the 
social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no 
schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they 
want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered -- it's the rich 
liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, 
and they don't care about you -— they just want to give everything away to 
illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.

Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but 
rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones 
that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical 
analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. 
This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with 
similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were 
answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and 
the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].

I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American, "Yeah, 
you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established over the 
years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an answer. And they're 
not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal coherence and logic 
to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they 
sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to 
everything -— a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that 
goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and 
talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, "Take 
over your factories."

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23178