Noam Chomsky on civil libertarians and free speech - new talk vid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Revolutionary_Violence:_Bloodbaths_in_Fact_%26_Propaganda WOW I didn't even KNOW about this book!! I read it as "Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. 1 and 2" published by the small independent South End Press. AMAZING that it got censored by Warner Bros and the publisher got taken out. Simply Stunning! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_censorship_in_the_United_States here is Noam talking about it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUGr5rZSWPo and here's the book https://chomsky.info/counter-revolutionary-violence/
The head of Warner Publishing wanted to stop the publication of the book, and Warner Modular was shut down as a result.
Warner Modular initially agreed to print 20,000 copies of the book. Warner Modular's publisher, Claude McCaleb, had spent his career publishing books for universities, and CRV was planned as part of a series of works that studied American institutions, which McCaleb believed would be timely after the Watergate scandal. Warner Modular had prepared ads to run in various periodicals that promoted CRV, in anticipation of an upcoming convention of the American Sociological Association in New York City. According to McCaleb, in an affidavit to Chomsky and Herman quoted in Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly, on August 27, 1973, the chief of book operations at Warner Communications, William Sarnoff, nephew of David Sarnoff, saw the ads come across his desk and called McCaleb's office in Andover, Massachusetts and Sarnoff asked if CRV would be another Pentagon Papers that would embarrass Warner. McCaleb replied that it was not a document leak, but was an analysis of public material by two established academics. Two hours later, Sarnoff called again and asked McCaleb to fly that night and bring an advance copy of the book to his office in New York City.[2][3] In the morning McCaleb dropped off the book at Sarnoff's office and then went to the booth at the American Sociological Association's conference, awaiting the advance copies of CRV that were just coming off of the presses. Within a few hours, Sarnoff asked McCaleb to come back to his office.[4] McCaleb is quoted as saying:
Sarnoff immediately launched into a violent verbal attack on me for having published CRV saying, among other things, that it was a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans, undocumented, a publication unworthy of a serious publisher.
McCaleb reminded Sarnoff of the arrangement that they had when McCaleb was hired: he and his staff were given discretion to select what to publish, and that their sales levels would measure their success. Sarnoff dismissed McCaleb's argument by stating that the arrangement did not cover works that were "worthless and full of lies." Sarnoff complained that too many of Warner Modular's works were written by left-wing writers. McCaleb replied that conservative writers were also represented, and that Warner Modular had planned to publish works by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
Sarnoff then canceled the ads for CRV, ordered the destruction of the first printing of CRV, as well as the Warner Modular catalog that listed them, and announced that he would not release one copy of CRV to anybody. When McCaleb replied that such an outrageous move would shatter Warner Modular's staff and shock the publishing world, Sarnoff replied that he did not "give a damn what I, my staff, the authors, or the academic community thought and ended by saying that we should destroy the entire inventory of CRV".[5][2]
Warner Publishing decided to shut down Warner Modular before CRV could be published. The print run was not initially destroyed because of contractual obligations, but the book was passed on to MSS Information Corporation for promotion and distribution after Warner Publishing shut down Warner Modular.[1][6] However, MSS engaged in no promotion, as it was not a commercial publishing company and had no distribution facilities. Only 500 copies of the 20,000-copy printing survived. Radical America obtained and distributed some copies, because its staff already knew of CRV's existence.[6] According to Chomsky, the rest were "pulped," not burned. Despite its suppression in the United States, it was translated into several European languages, had two printings in France by the time that The Washington Connection was printed, and CRV's suppression became a "minor cause celebre" in France.[7]
The work is the foundation of the authors' much expanded two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights, published in 1979.[8]
Noam Chomsky gives long chat on consciousness, liberation theology, the evil of the US Empire, etc.
Noam knows his Pascal. How many people can say that?
The "preferential option for the poor" refers to a trend, throughout the Bible, of preference being given to the well-being of the poor and powerless of society in the teachings and commands of God as well as the prophets and other righteous people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Memorandum,_1971
The Powell Memorandum thus became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing .
Chomsky:
the bombings under Drumpf have gone way up: assessments of civilian causalities have gone way down. That's a war crime. That's the least of it. The WORST crime that Drumpf has committed and is committing day after day, is working with dedication and fervor to destroy for organized human life on Earth: That's what it means to press harder, to maximize the use of fossil fuels, open up new reserves for drilling, cut back on the regulations that somewhat mitigate the coming catastrophe. Alone in the world, Drumpf is racing towards environmental catastrophe: Which will come if we continue on this course. And not in the distant future. Now maybe that's not called a Crime in the Criminal system but in any moral system that we can even talk about with a straight face, that's an incomparable crime. There's no criminal in human history whose been doing that, not Hitler, not Genghis Khan, not anyone.
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