Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library
Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library
Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library
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CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM<br />
Cubans have l<strong>on</strong>g been berated for the same kinds of backwardness.<br />
Outrage peaked during the Pan-American games held in the United States,<br />
when Cuban athletes failed to succumb to a huge propaganda campaign to<br />
induce them to defect, including lavish financial offers to become professi<strong>on</strong>als;<br />
they felt a commitment to their COUntry and its people, they told rep<strong>on</strong>ers.<br />
Fury knew few bounds over the devastating impact of Communist brainwashing<br />
and Marxist doctrine.<br />
F<strong>on</strong>unately, Americans are protected from the fact that even under the c<strong>on</strong>diti<strong>on</strong>s<br />
of poverty imposed by US ec<strong>on</strong>omic warfare, Cubans still refuse to<br />
accept dollars for domestic service, so visitors rep<strong>on</strong>, not wanting to be "your<br />
slave." Nor are they likely to be subjected to the results of a 1994 Gallup poll,<br />
c<strong>on</strong>sidered to be [he first independent and scientific survey, published in [he<br />
Miami Spanish-language press but apparently not elsewhere: that 88 percent<br />
said they were "proud of being Cuban" and 58 percent that "the revoluti<strong>on</strong>'s<br />
successes outstrip its failures," 69 percent identified themselves as "revoluti<strong>on</strong>aries"<br />
(but <strong>on</strong>ly 21 percent as "Communist" or "socialist"), 76 percent said<br />
they were "satisfied with their pers<strong>on</strong>al life," and 3 percem said that "political<br />
problems" were the key problems facing the country.<br />
If such Communist atrocities were to be known, it might be necessary to<br />
nuke Havana instead of simply trying to kill as many people as possible from<br />
starvati<strong>on</strong> and disease to bring "democracy." That became the new pretext for<br />
strangling Cuba after the fall of the Berlin wall, the ideological instituti<strong>on</strong>s not<br />
missing a beat as they shifted gears. No l<strong>on</strong>ger was Cuba an agent of the<br />
Kremlin, bent <strong>on</strong> taking over Latin America and c<strong>on</strong>quering the United States,<br />
trembling in terror. The lies of30 years can be quietly shelved: terror and ec<strong>on</strong>omic<br />
warfare have always been an attempt to bring democracy, in the revised<br />
standard versi<strong>on</strong>. Therefore we must tighten the embargo that "has c<strong>on</strong>tributed<br />
to an increase in hunger, illness, death and to <strong>on</strong>e of the world's largest<br />
neurological epidemics in the past century," according to health expens writing<br />
in US medical journals in October 1994. The author of <strong>on</strong>e says, "Well,<br />
the fact is that we are killing people," by denying them food and medicines,<br />
and equipment for manufacturing their own medical products.<br />
Clint<strong>on</strong>'s "Cuban Democracy Act"-which President Bush at first vetoed<br />
because it was so transparently in violati<strong>on</strong> of internati<strong>on</strong>al law, and then<br />
signed when he was outflanked from the right by Clint<strong>on</strong> during the electi<strong>on</strong><br />
campaign-cut off trade by US subsidiaries abroad, 90 percent of it food,<br />
medicine and medical equipment. That c<strong>on</strong>tributi<strong>on</strong> to democracy helped to<br />
bring about a c<strong>on</strong>siderable decline in Cuban health standards, an increase in<br />
mortality rates, and "the most alarming public health crisis in Cuba in recent<br />
memory," a neurological disease that had last been observed in tropical pris<strong>on</strong><br />
camps in Southeast Asia in World War II, according to the former chief of<br />
neuro-epidemiology at the Nati<strong>on</strong>al Institute of Health, the author of <strong>on</strong>e of<br />
the anicles. To illustrate the effects, a Columbia University Professor of<br />
199