Chomsky to compare Arab Spring to ‘American Winter’ in Westbrook talk

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

“The uniformity and obedience of the media … any dictator would admire.”

“No individual gets up and says, ‘I’m going to take this because I want it.’ He’d say, ‘I’m going to take it because it really belongs to me and it would be better for everyone if I had it.’ It’s true of children fighting over toys. And it’s true of governments going to war. Nobody is ever involved in an aggressive war; it’s always a defensive war — on both sides.”

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”

“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.”

Those were some of the many quotations that have been attributed over the years to the man in the above picture, the “Father of Modern Linguistics” Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he’s delivering a talk at the Westbrook Performing Arts Center on Dec. 12 at the invitation of the University of New England’s Center for Global Humanities. The event is free and begins at 6 p.m.

This particular speech is, as a UNE announcement states, about “the irony that while the people of the Middle East are demanding the right to good education, health and employment, Americans — battered by an economic system that eludes most people’s grasp — seem to be resigned to a future without such rights.”

The title of the talk is “Arab Spring, American Winter.”

The school announcement doesn’t explicitly say so, but it certainly sounds like Chomsky is going to pontificate on the Occupy Wall Street movement, and knowing how he feels about corporate influence on government, the media and public discourse, it’ll be interesting to hear.

Here’s some background on Noam Chomsky as provided by UNE:

While a Junior Fellow at Harvard University in the 1950s Chomsky completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, “Transformational Analysis.”  Later, major theoretical viewpoints of the dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, which was published in 1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published in 1975.

Chomsky joined the MIT staff in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy).  From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor, a position he holds today.

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.