Chomsky Takes Thunder Down Under – OpEd

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By Dr Tim Themi

Myths about the benevolence of Anglo-American foreign policy were utterly exploded last Friday night in Melbourne, as Professor Noam Chomsky thundered out his latest critique of the changing contours of global order.

Invited out for the second time by Deakin for only his second ever appearance in Melbourne, Professor Chomsky began the analysis with a United States at the peak of its imperialist powers and ambitions following the catastrophes of WWII.

But then a “double decline” set in, Chomsky explained, firstly without and then within. Outside their borders China was “lost,” it became “independent,” and others were keen to follow suit. While deep inside, America underwent a de-industrialisation period, outsourcing its labour to the many slave trades it had created around the world, and eventually handed over control of its economy to speculative financial hustlers.

The facts were grisly and oft-recounted with masterful detail: the stagnating wages in the face of record CEO profits; the lack of health care; the smashing of unions; the Republican race-to-the-bottom with the politics of fear and stupidity; the invasion of Vietnam and Indochina; the terrorist assaults on Latin America; the installing of a fascist dictatorship in a freshly liberated Greece; subversions in Italy; and the illegal wars on Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan – the latter which continues with bi-partisan Australian Government, and therefore media, support.

Myths about America’s noble deeds and intentions in these incursions fell away as Chomsky cited from the internal records of Washington planners and their declassified documents, revealing an elite obsessed with controlling all the world’s material resources, regardless of any human toll.

Right up till today, Chomsky remarked, where the Occupy movement just went global in an unprecedented wave of popular resistance. His praise of this was unreserved. “Keep doing what you are doing,” he told one Australian Occupy group. “It’s very important.”

Tim Themi is a PhD in Philosophy & Psychoanalysis from the School of International & Political Studies at Deakin. He also holds honours degrees in Philosophy from La Trobe and the Engineering Sciences from Melbourne. His doctoral dissertation enjoined the psychoanalysis of Lacan and the philosophy of Nietzsche on the question of desire and ethics. He is also a committed activist at large and in the social media. See his Facebook Page here.

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