A Late interview with Noam Chomsky
In May 2023, a few weeks before he became very sick, Declassified UK’s Matt Kennard interviewed Professor Noam Chomsky.
They discuss his life and work, the media and 70+ years of Israeli occupation.
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His brilliant mind shines in this interview even at this age. His extraordinary ability to connect the dots and guide you through history is unparalleled. One of the greatest minds of our time. One of the greatest minds to grace our civilization ever. One can’t but listen in rapture at his ability to disect the motives of men. He is a personal hero of mine.
Yes, I’ve studied some of this formally, and later less formally. As well as the (difficult, academic but key) book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Haitian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, we might consider the links between Haiti and the towering monument to Henry Dundas in Edinburgh.
“Dundas was one of the most influential Scottish political figures of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In his role as Secretary of State for War, Dundas oversaw the British invasion of Haiti, where a revolution led by enslaved people had begun in 1791.
“The invasion was partly motivated by the fear that enslaved people in the British colonies would take inspiration from the Haitian Revolution. The British were committed to restoring slavery on Haiti but the invasion was ultimately a failure and ended in a British retreat from the island. Through the remainder of the 1790s, Dundas was instrumental in delaying the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.”
https://www.nls.uk/collections/scotland-and-the-slave-trade/involvement/
I’ve just finished and highly recommend historian Susan Williams’ book White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa, which focuses on events in Ghana and the Congo between 1957 and 1966, where the USAmerican Empire was moving to take over from European empires like the British, Belgian, French and Portuguese, under the guise of friendship and the false pretence of supporting decolonisation and democracy. The book fleshes out a lot of things Noam Chomsky talks about here, and suggests the USA and its allies might go considerably further in dealing with international organisations that resist its hegemony than withdrawing cooperation.