Letters
LETTERS to the Editor Readers Respond to Chomsky's Thinkable Thought* Noam Chomsky's description of how societies set their own terms of debate and marginalize contributions outside the bounds of...
...At the end, most of Indochina was destroyed, with three million to four million killed...
...in "El Paso," Marty Robbins wrote about passion, jealousy, and subsequent murder...
...The sophistication of mind control exercised by the military is frightening...
...In my part of the nation, a large percentage of supposedly "impressionable" teens listen to country music...
...Tipper Gore's group wants an "Occult" warning label attached to certain records...
...democratic "manufacture of consent...
...For progressive people to take retaliatory actions against a magazine that is, on balance, a resource to all progressives, is just plain stupid...
...The book review of Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family was just what I needed after wondering whether my own experience of visiting Nicaragua had been a deception, given what Shirley Christian had written...
...The poignant contradiction is that such permissiveness is not extended to the citizens of totalitarian partner states allied with the democracies (e.g., South Korea or Guatemala), where the coercive violence exceeds that practiced in most communist dictatorships...
...Joon-Mann Kang Madison, Wisconsin Those who wish to paste cautionary labels on records curiously limit them-i selves to just rock music, as if teens listen to nothing else...
...non-sarcastic use of the terms "free world" and "democracy" in reference to the First World, and an attempt to harness the concepts of anti-Sovietism and anti-capitalism to the same ideological yoke...
...The death toll was approaching one million by the time protest became significant...
...Kenny Rogers sang of rape and retribution in "Coward of the County," as did Tanya Tucker in "No Man's Land...
...And for both countries, as well as elsewhere in the world, our Government and mainstream media maintain that American intervention is in behalf of freedom...
...Country lyrics can also be suggestive ("Would You Lay With Me in a Field of Stone") and even violent...
...The correct title is the National Organization for Women...
...Although the withdrawal of reward is also a form of coercion, the effects are rather different...
...Morrow overlooks the brilliant successes of "manufacture of consent" in Indochina...
...If the Indians won, it was a massacre...
...I was like that, too, in my youth and even in my thirties...
...Chomsky's main point, though—that totalitarian regimes (e.g., the Soviet Union) control their people through "violence" while democratic governments (e.g., the United States) control their people through "propaganda"—can be rephrased to examine the contrast between the stick and the carrot as techniques of social influence...
...The anger we feel when our best friends do something we consider unjust would be better channeled against our worst enemies, who are a much more loathsome and powerful bunch of folks...
...I appreciate its forum for free thought far too much to withdraw support because of disagreement...
...Tom Cahill Napa, California Fan Mail Irecently received your notice of the impending expiration of my subscription and threw it away...
...Noam Chomsky Cambridge, Massachusetts Noam Chomsky recalls the 1983 story of the Soviet broadcaster who denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then paints a most highly selective picture of protests in America against the war in Vietnam, and sadly concludes...
...I see no reason to refrain from what appears to me to be an accurate analysis merely because it happens to coincide in part with condemnations by people who are as grotesque as their international opponents...
...This places him in his set of "rule-abiding critics" whose demonstration that the two systems are "basically the same" and equally corrupt feeds into Americans' complacent self-indulgent acceptance of the status quo...
...The amazing parade of verbal assaults, canceled subscriptions, funding cut-offs, etc., makes it no wonder that we are a divided and impotent political force...
...reward...
...Robert O. Kelley Exeter, New Hampshire This is not another comment on The Progressive's decision to accept an advertisement from the anti-abortion group Feminists for Life of America...
...The prevailing atmosphere in the United States of racism, anticom-munism, and elitism helped spawn the reactionary rabbi, just as it coughed up the likes of Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms—and Ronald Reagan...
...I am familiar with the haughty elitism from which Chomsky denigrates democracy...
...If we try, we will be on the fringe of this country's political process forever...
...This was in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
...Contrary to what James Fife alleges, this is not a "right-wing stance" but rather a left-wing stance, from the earliest days, when the Bolshevik project was subjected to accurate and penetrating criticism by anarchists and left-wing Marxists who recognized the reality for what it was...
...To me, this also defines religion...
...I regret throwing away my subscription expiration notice...
...I need The Progressive...
...Your November issue came...
...Philosophical differences should foster open communication and even debate, but not withdrawal...
...armed forces to bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age...
...For more information contact us at 433 Jefferson Street, Oakland, CA 94607, or call (415) 8345656...
...Both The Progressive and its readers need all the support we can get...
...Or they're just incredibly naive and narrow-minded...
...This "new consensus" is marked by largely unqualified use of right-wing slurs against Soviet media policy, democratic practices, and treatment of dissent...
...Steve Wagner Oakland, California Proud Papa In response to the "Proud Papa" Comment (November issue), is it possible that a man as old as Edward Teller is in a position to be planning America's future...
...Chomsky's article is a fine example of clear thinking that turns fright into educated anger...
...They and their successors created a dungeon, which they rule by force, and which they have extended to Eastern Europe and now Afghanistan...
...So how about occult warning labels on religious albums, gospel songs, and hymns of devotion to unseen, supernatural beings, lest they adversely influence unsuspecting children...
...Want to suppress violent lyrics...
...This advertisement in one magazine has inspired many leftists to occupy themselves attacking other, wrong-thinking leftists in the pages of this and even other progressive publications...
...Joan Cardellino Plant Closures Project Oakland, California Rational Discourse read the intense, detailed response of the Funding Exchange to The Progressive's position statement on its advertising policy ("Rational Discourse," Letters, September issue...
...I encourage the Funding Exchange to consider the fundamental error in its logic...
...Capitalist democracies tend to have a much greater abundance of rewards to reinforce media acceptance of the official line...
...But movements to effect substantial change in a society do not succeed, as a rule, until the diverse groups that make them up stop fighting amongst themselves and start fighting their real adversaries...
...This is not to say we should cover up our real moral disagreements...
...One example he didn't mention is a nuclear missile dubbed "peacekeeper" by Ronald Reagan and the Pentagon mob...
...Dave Forrest San Francisco, California Specter Was There n "Rape Behind Bars" (November issue), Tom Cahill refers to a Senate select committee that "in the early 1970s" heard testimony on sexual abuse in prisons...
...Stewart F. MacMillan Brewster, Massachusetts Some readers of The Progressive may remember when Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League was setting off bombs at Soviet diplomatic missions in New York and taking potshots at Soviet personnel stationed there...
...In this nation of well-educated individuals who are aware of the power of consciousness and use it consistently as they strive for success, do we possibly believe that these men represent and communicate with some "superpower," some authority, an Antichrist, perhaps, who backs their every egotistical, expansionist decision...
...Leo N. Miletich El Paso, Texas Israel's New Right Walter Ruby's otherwise excellent article on the growing popularity of Rabbi Meir Kahane in Israeli politics ("Israel's New Right," December issue) was disturbing because of a question that wasn't asked in his interview with a night clerk...
...What I cannot see is the rationale which prompts the Funding Exchange to remove its support from your (our) magazine because of a disagreement over an ad...
...The Plant Closures Project worked closely with unions to fight closures in Fremont, Ontario, San Lean-dro, San Francisco, and Oakland, to name a few of the cities where sudden and massive layoffs occurred...
...Stephen Donaldson has not been and is not accused of committing rape at any time...
...Carol Mottl Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania Not'or but for* I can't understand why Holly iMetz, in her Dateline article on "Sisters of Justice" (November issue), mentioned dissatisfaction about the National Organization of Women...
...For decades, conservative businessmen have been busy forming cartels and PACs while we have been busy forming splinter groups...
...After the peace movement "drove President Johnson from office," the event of which Morrow is so proud, the worst massacres began, and the war continued for seven years, a further tribute to the success of the doctrine that we were defending the land we had attacked...
...Their coerciveness is far more subtle...
...He has not "blown up unexpectedly several times" and is not meant as an example of a "living time bomb...
...Having devoted much of my life to the antiwar movement, I am not likely to overlook its existence...
...Such hits as "Bed of Roses" and "House of the Rising Sun" dealt with prostitution...
...Together with his chief assistant, Alan Davis, Specter gave valuable testimony to the Senate subcommittee investigating prison conditions, especially concerning sexual abuse...
...I am also troubled by the unforgiving or punitive application of principle...
...I wonder what the Funding Exchange's signers would think about a friend who behaved similarly...
...The article "The Disc Washers" was just what I needed after being approached by a zealous parishioner (I am a Catholic priest) and informed of the evils of rock music and told I should condemn it from the pulpit...
...The system of manufacture of consent has all too many victims to its credit...
...The Plant Closures Project continues to organize corporate campaigns, lobby for legislation, and conduct training sessions on labor and community response to closures...
...Compa mentions the United Electrical Workers' campaign to save the Simpson DuraVent plant in San Mateo...
...Chomsky tries to equate Soviet totalitarian violence with U.S...
...Far from equating the United States and the Soviet Union, I emphasized the radical internal differences between them...
...And the article "Rape Behind Bars" came one day after returning from a visit to the Jackson prison mentioned in the article and hearing for myself the stories of fear and hurt and humiliation...
...There is no such organization...
...Steven D. Cron Grand Rapids, Michigan Correction Tom Cahill's "Rape Behind Bars" (November issue) contained certain inaccuracies with regard to Stephen Donaldson, which the author and The Progressive regret...
...Yes, perhaps we didn't have a broadcaster like Danchev, but we had something much better, something utterly inconceivable in the totalitarian Soviet Union: We had a mass movement, a rising tide of people, who made it politically impossible for the U.S...
...It's sick enough that so many people voted for seventy-four-year-old Ronald Reagan, who has given no indication that he cares about what happens to the world after he leaves it...
...He mentions Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania as a member of that committee...
...Jennifer A. Wheeler Narberth, Pennsylvania The author replies: Arlen Specter participated in the hearings not as a Senator but as district attorney of Philadelphia...
...Noam Chomsky Cambridge, Massachusetts Noam Chomsky's article struck home...
...Furthermore, a true account of the way the system functions does not express an elitist contempt for democracy...
...We should understand it and combat it, not construct fables about its occasional and partial failures...
...In what I suppose to be an attempt to appear balanced, liberal and left-wing discussion has increasingly taken a hard-line approach to the Soviet Union...
...That is, dictatorships—not only of the communist variety—use coercion as their primary mode of political control...
...The Project was instrumental in rallying public support to protest the closure, and helped draft the Vacaville ordinance, which prevents any company from using public financing to move jobs from one community to another...
...Elizabeth Steckman Everett, Pennsylvania The Disc Washers I applaud Nat HentofPs "The I Disc Washers" (November issue...
...Such punitive response ignores the unique voice that The Progressive responsibly brings to a host of issues of social importance...
...Whereas coercion breeds resentment and disjunction between public and private compliance, reward brings a much closer alignment between public and private acceptance...
...There will always be many issues on which we cannot agree, and there is no harm in saying so while still supporting each other as members of a broader movement for social justice...
...I have enough to read...
...Since totalitarian regimes obviously use propaganda as much as democratic governments, I would relabel Chomsky's violence-vs.-prop-aganda dichotomy as one of coercion vs...
...C&W has its suicide songs as well, such as Donna Fargo's haunting "Forever Is as Far as I Could Go...
...Chomsky steps into all of these mires (right down to using Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's favorite adjective for any socialist state: totalitarian) and so he helps forge one of the debate-restricting consensuses he warns against...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...The United States lost the war because the antiwar mass movement made all-out victory impossible...
...George Levinger Amherst, Massachusetts Noam Chomsky's article reminded me of an old Indian insight into new-speak: "If the whites won, it was LETTERS to the Editor a battle...
...The clerk, concerned about the sexual involvement of Jewish women with Arab men, said, "I think it is antithetical to everything this country is about for Jewish women to sleep with Arabs...
...Finally, Donaldson taught Buddhism at Columbia University in 1976-1977, not in 1973 when he worked as a newspaper reporter...
...Democracies, on the other hand, use reward as their main form of motivation...
...The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...Sure sounds like glorification of war to me...
...The Parents Music Resource Center reminds me of Carry Nation, the temperance agitator who used a hatchet to wreck saloons all over the country...
...Frank W. Goheen Camas, Washington Fighting Back Lance Compa's article on plant-closing fightbacks ("Fighting Back," October issue) was very good, but he failed to mention organizations that sprang up around the country specifically to deal with the issues of plant shutdowns and economic dislocation...
...But a funny thing happened...
...Jacqueline Bet-Gainesville, Florida In Noam Chomsky's bold comparison of democratic and totalitarian modes of thought control, I was particularly struck by his sharp analogy between current events in Nicaragua and El Salvador: "In each country, a terrorist military force is massacring civilians, and in each country we support force...
...No less than the Israeli political system and news media, the American power elite is playing right into the hands of this latter-day Fiihrer...
...There was barely a peep of protest for almost twenty years while the United States backed the French war, undermined a political settlement, launched a campaign of terror in the South, and then attacked it directly...
...While Donaldson was jailed several times in the 1970s on charges which were dismissed or withdrawn prior to trial, he was only convicted and sentenced to prison once, in 1980...
...I hope I can renew without it...
...I admit to some personal ambivalence on the issue of appropriate advertising and see some merit to each position...
...The latter happens often enough but is it not pathetic that Chomsky should cite it in connection with Vietnam, when the "manufacture of consent" failed miserably and the antiwar movement drove President Johnson from office...
...True, it would have been still worse had it not been for the direct action undertaken by the peace movement outside the formal political system, leading the war criminals to modify their project as the costs of aggression mounted, but I feel less inclined to self-congratulation than Morrow does about what we did and did not accomplish...
...I do not, incidentally, accept Fife's characterization of what I said in this connection, but will not pursue the matter here...
...Publications such as The Progressive are allowed to continue indefinitely, and public speakers such as Chomsky are allowed to speak, even though market processes keep down their audiences...
...Felix Morrow Great Neck, New York The author replies: Felix Morrow misunderstood what he read...
...To those women with hatchets: Please try Wilde's advice on your own children...
...Why doesn't Tipper Gore slap alcohol abuse labels on the hundreds of country and Western songs put out each year that glorify getting drunk...
...There are no Danchevs here, except at the remote margins of political debate...
...It seems to me that the best solution to the threat posed by bigots like Rabbi Kahane and perhaps to the overall Israel/Arab problem would be a dramatic increase in the sexual involvement of Jews and Arabs...
...Opinions to the contrary are dismissed as naive, ingenuous, or outright propaganda by a Soviet dupe...
...Since none of these is on the list of rock standards, and no one is protesting all this drinking and violence and sex, I can only conclude that Tipper Gore's friends are more politically motivated than they admit...
...I find it hard to believe what Chomsky has managed to convince himself to write...
...I am a reasonably discerning reader who does not feel the need to be protected by the Funding Exchange or other parental organizations (though I'm certain of their benevolent intentions...
...Though mainstream conformity is rewarded, dissent is generally permitted within democratic countries...
...Oscar Wilde said, "The best way to make children good is to make them happy...
...This is a comment on the exchanges of venom and ill-will it seems to have spawned...
...My dictionary defines "occult" as "claiming knowledge of supernatural agencies" and "beyond the range of ordinary knowledge...
...The state system established by Lenin and Trotsky was the very model of totalitarianism...
...It is one of eight chapters of the statewide Coalition Against Plant Shutdowns...
...it is a step towards creating meaningful democracy...
...Might they not find such conduct uncompromisingly rigid...
...What better way is there to resolve differences...
...LETTERS to the Editor Readers Respond to Chomsky's Thinkable Thought* Noam Chomsky's description of how societies set their own terms of debate and marginalize contributions outside the bounds of the "thinkable" ("The Bounds of Thinkable Thought," October issue) was interesting reading, but he overlooked one example that his own article helps perpetuate: There seems to be a growing inclination in progressive literature to accept the right-wing stance that the Soviet Union is aggressive, mendacious, and bent on world domination...
...Furthermore, from the earliest days they sought to undermine any possibility of socialism, and they succeeded...
...The Plant Closures Project of Oakland, California, formed in 1981 as an alliance of concerned individuals from labor, religious, and community organizations...
...Chomsky takes pot-shots at American thought-control while tearing strips off analogous Soviet practices...
...Your Memo, "Even Next Door," was just what I needed after engaging in a rather heated discussion with some other parishioners regarding how far one may go in protecting one's property...
...The American news media, while not completely justifying the thugs, implied that their actions were at least "understandable...
...We are naive if we believe we can hold each other to absolute political rectitude on every issue of importance to us...
...James Fife Dublin, Ireland The author replies: My attitude toward the Soviet Union is not based on Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher—indeed, it has not changed in essence for forty years—but on what I believe to be the facts...
...Such punishment doesn't fit the perceived crime...
...I do, however, feel the dire need for access to The Progressive...
...He is at least as much our problem as an Israeli problem...
...I did not discuss the protest movement, apart from noting the exclusion of its stand from the hawk-dove debate, but rather the system of indoctrination...
...Specter, however, was not elected to the Senate until 1980, and could not have participated in those hearings...
...Try these: "And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air...
...That contradiction is, indeed, ignored generally in the United States and in other Western democracies...
...Or, from the little-sung third verse: "Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution...
...Of course, the obvious follow-up question should have been, "How about Jewish men who sleep with Arab women...
...But it is time to put away childish things...
...I cannot keep up with all of it as it is, so I decided to save the $23.50 and let The Progressive go...
...I have disagreed with many of the positions The Progressive has advocated...
...One might say Kahane is the most significant item of "foreign aid" America has ever given Israel...
Vol. 50 • January 1986 • No. 1
