Posted by Bern
on November 4, 2009, 11:37 am, in reply to "Re: Another hopeless interview by another journalist in love with his own voice"
Yes, it's really shocking how Sackur followed a Chomsky-baiting agenda.
But I don't think the interview was either hopeless, or a waste of time.
In the first place Chomsky, to his great credit does no rise to this sort of baiting, and this exposes the prejudiced way in which he is being interviewed.
But in addition, and I thought extremely valuable, when he was challenged to say what was good about the US, he turned the table completely, by demolished some historical mythologies. In the first place about the source of USs astonishing wealth. That, as he explained, was made possible partly due to the original British colonists having exterminated the native population in the 17th and 18th centuries, and how the early Americas seized half of Mexico, created slavery, and limited rights to the propertied. In addition, he emphasises that liberties, like freedom of speech, do not derive from the founding Father, or the Bill of Right, but on the contrary are recent, mostly due to the 20th century struggles of the Civil Rights movement. Sackur had no reply to offer!
--Previous Message--
: I thought that Chomsky was operating at the
: post-conventional level of moral reasoning
: (in Kholberg's stages theory) and the hacks
: were at the conventional level so it was no
: surprise that the hacks offered bad manners
: and rhetorical questions and Chomsky
: resisted the invitation (most of the time)
: to swat them. It was like a normal person
: dealing with a generic manager.
:
Responses: