[Peace-discuss] Chomsky compilation

Sun Aug 17 16:02:40 EDT 2014

The following conversations offer a political education, in contrast to the to mystifications typically forthcoming from the ideological departments of our institutions of the higher learning; they're an antidote for the acculturated.

Noam Chomsky, from Journal of Advanced Composition, 11:1 (1991)--

'I once had an interview at a radio station in which the interviewer was interested in why I don’t appear on MacNeil/Lehrer, Nightline, and that sort of program. He began the interview by playing a short tape of an earlier interview he’d had with a producer of Nightline. The interviewer asked him this question: “It’s been claimed that the people on your program are all biased in one direction and that you cut out critical, dissident thought. How come, for example, you never have Chomsky on your program?” The producer first went into sort of a tantrum, saying I was from Neptune, and “wacko” and so on; but after he’d calmed down he said something which, in fact, has an element of truth to it: “Chomsky lacks concision.” 

'Concision means you have to be able to say things between two commercials. Now that’s a structural property of our media—a very important structural property which imposes conformism in a very deep way, because if you have to meet the condition of concision, you can only either repeat conventional platitudes or else sound like you are from Neptune That is, if you say anything that’s not conventional, it’s going to sound very strange. For example, if I get up on television and say, “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a horror,” that meets the condition of concision. I don’t have to back it up with any evidence; everyone believes it already so therefore it’s straightforward and now comes the commercial Suppose I get up in the same two minutes and say, “The U.S. invasion of South Vietnam is a horror.” Well, people are very surprised. They never knew there was a U.S. invasion of South Vietnam, so how could it be a horror? They heard of something called the U.S. “defense” of South Vietnam, and maybe that it was wrong, but they never heard anybody talk about the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam. So, therefore, they have a right to ask what I’m talking about. Copy editors will ask me when I try to sneak something like this into an article what I mean. They’ll say, “I don't remember any such event.” They have a right to ask what I mean. 

'This structural requirement of concision that’s imposed by our media disallows the possibility of explanation; in fact, that’s its propaganda function It means that you can repeat conventional platitudes, but you can’t say anything out of the ordinary without sounding as if you’re from Neptune, a wacko, because to explain what you meant—and people have a right to ask if it’s an unconventional thought—would take a little bit of time. Here in the United States, to my knowledge, it’s quite different from virtually every other society, maybe with the exception of Japan, which is more or less in our model. But at least in my experience, when you appear on radio and television in Europe and the Third World—first of all you can appear on radio and television if you have dissident opinions, which is virtually impossible here—you have enough time to explain what you mean. You don’t have to have three sentences between two commercials, and if it takes a few minutes to explain or, more often, an hour, you have that time. 

'Here, our media are constructed so you don’t have time; you have to meet the condition of concision. And whether anybody in the public relations industry thought this up or not, the fact is that it’s highly functional to impose thought control. Pretty much the same is true in writing, like when you’ve got to say something in seven-hundred words. That’s another way of imposing the condition of conventional thinking and of blocking searching inquiry and critical analysis. I think one effect of this is a kind of illiteracy.'  

On Aug 17, 2014, at 9:23 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> 813: Noam!
> 
> A four-hour compilation of great interviews over the past 13 years with the inimitable Chuck Mertz.
> 
> DG
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