Noam Chomsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…If I look back on someone like Susan Sontag — she becomes, it seems to be, a Maoist. Why is it that left libertarianism touches her and many others so little? What’s the appeal of Maoism? Isn’t that the opposite of left libertarianism and what you stand for? There was a tendency in what’s called, among left intellectuals, late ’60s, early ’70s, to flirt with Maoism. They had no idea what it was. It was a very mixed story. Had very brutal, harsh elements, destructive elements. There are also aspects of Maoism which aren’t discussed much here. The scholarship is aware of them. One of the things that the Maoist policies did was save a hundred million people. A hundred million people were saved from death and starvation, as compared with democratic, capitalist India in the same years. You look from 1949 liberation to 1979, compare the demographics of the two countries. There’s a gap of a hundred million people killed in India as compared with China, simply because of the lack of carrying out rural development and healthcare programs. There’s no big secret about this. It’s discussed by some of the leading scholars like Amartya Sen, for example, a Nobel Laureate in Indian economics. This is one of his main specialties, hardly obscure, but you don’t hear about it. That’s manufacture of consent again. But this is not why people on the left flirted with Maoism. They had all sorts of confused ideas about Maoism. In fact, if you want the most enthusiastic Maoist in the country, his name happens to be Henry Kissinger. He adored Mao, he worshiped him. If you want a picture of this, I urge that you take a look at a very important scholarly work that just appeared, Carolyn Eisenberg’s extensive, detailed study of the Nixon-Kissinger years, using extensive archival material. One of the things that comes out is Kissinger’s starry-eyed adoration for Mao. He himself was a terrible sycophant for Mao in particular. Which do you feel has seen a better trajectory if you compare the two countries: Nicaragua, which has experimented partially with socialism, and Panama, which has been more capitalistic? Hasn’t Panama just done much, much better than Nicaragua? And I’ve been to both countries in the last 10 years. To me, it doesn’t seem close. What am I missing?…

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