Saswat Pattanayak interviews Noam Chomsky

Assange and WikiLeaks have taken great personal risks to facilitate the process of a worldwide revolution that empowers the citizens hitherto considered ordinary, and the methods of transparency and truth-seeking, hitherto considered criminal in the eyes of the ruling structures.

In the most grotesque of historical misrepresentations, Gandhi and King have today been reduced by their false worshippers at highest of world powers, to becoming exactly the opposite of what they stood for: as poster boys for global capitalism, of the military-industrial complex, the new permanent features of the status quo, dazed and dumbed down on the revised Mt. Rushmore.

America has witnessed more revolutionary upheavals than any other modern nation. Abolitionism, women suffrage movement, Wobblies, anarchism, anti-McCarthyism, black upsurge against racial segregation, New Left, anti-Vietnam War resistance movement, Stonewall and LGBT movements, Black Panther Party, and anti-WTO protests in Seattle are among hundreds of other small and significant revolutionary sparks which provide important lessons for the global working class solidarity against capitalism, racism and patriarchy.

A new dialogue about India and Pakistan requires new imaginations. A federal reunification manifesto with autonomous rights to both nation-states is not as dangerous a proposal as the original partition sketch. A mutual agreement for complete disarmament between India and Pakistan is not likely to be as unfriendly a conversation as the surreptitious nature of warmongering going on for decades.

Inspired by Savarkar, the Hindu Nation has found its modern day distinct ideology through writings of Keshava Hedgewar and Madhav Golwalkar. Full of hatred and parochial intents, Hindu supremacism has mesmerized the country today. Once, a communal outburst, Hindu nationalism today has gained not only a cultural admissibility in the form of RSS, but also a wide-scale political platform in the form of BJP. The killers of Gandhi are celebrated in the land of the Buddha.

The blood narrates Orissa’s history as the history of tribal uprisings against socio-economic injustice. And that, her future, too, shall be shaped by the mandates of the dispossessed, not by the whims of the oligarchs.

Just as the indigenous organizers were correct in their assessment of human values in the past, it is more likely that keeping in view the status quo of power dynamics in independent India, their dissent towards the power this time around, too, is indicative of appropriate impatience towards prevailing rampant social injustice.

Our freedom is not about piecemeal compensations as agreed upon by corporate giants of South Korea, Japan and the United States. Our freedom is not open to half-hearted round table negotiations. We are yet to attain the freedom we have been dying for since generations. And we are yet to give up the hope that one day, we shall collectively inhabit the planet, without submitting any portion thereof to any greedy private capitalistic interests, irrespective of geographical territories.

Parsons’ commitment to the cause of international communism often embarrassed the United States administration. FBI confiscated her library comprising over 1,500 books and progressive works soon after her accidental death – thus preventing the country of having access to her radicalism.

Employing radical perspectives, Howard Zinn has not only left behind issues that have legacies of progressivism, but also equally powerful tools for future reinventions of the current world. “We the people” are stricken by the grief of his passage, but enriched by his enduring imaginings.

In fundamentally challenging Ayodhya verdict, Indians also had the opportunity to declare that the people want communal peace and harmony and this can be achieved if they kept their beliefs at homes and not bring them to the roads. Just as they defecate at home and not make a public ceremony out of it.

Nobel Peace Prize, in reality is an apologist for, and celebration of continued Eurocentric imperialism. Obama is the latest one to have been “humbled”. Amidst his militarist interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, through his announcements for larger US troops for invasions and bigger budget to feed the military-industrial complex, the Nobel committees have yet again perpetuated a reactionary definition of peace. In their world of successes and achievements, they have merely crowned their King.

What Letterman has done is sheer abuse of his economic power and gender privilege. His unabashed claim that any disclosure of the details would embarrass his women employees he had sex with, evidences blatant sexism. Its a great irony of our times that women continue to not only put up with sexual advances at workplaces, but also are expected to maintain silence in fear of their career prospects. And here is a liberal intellectual who advances this regressive theory in an effort to “protect” his victims.

For more than three decades (32 years, to be precise), this man was not arrested by the American judiciary. He did not even have to abscond, or flee, as the media reports suggest. He remained in public limelight, continued making movies in Britain, France and Poland. The Oscar jury even shamelessly awarded him with the highest prizes. He could easily have been arrested within three weeks of his departure from the United States. Three decades made him mere immortal.

Moore’s intents at attacking capitalism is much appreciated, and most timely for him to win few more awards from the European jury. But his tools of deconstructing capitalism as necessarily antithetical to political democracy, his analysis of class relations from the standpoint of Bill of Rights, his reliance on Germany, England and Japan as model democracies, and his aspirations to offer the political democracy as a solution to the global economic crisis, instead of isolating it as one of the root causes are worth inspections all over again.