"Noam
Chomsky." By jeanbaptisteparis. Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) / "Braiiiinnnsss"
(Hillary Clinton). By Lucas Cobb. Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
Jan. 28, 2016
Another
presidential election charade is upon us and I’m reminded of something
the late Pakistani dissident, Eqbal Ahmad, once said about Noam Chomsky
in the book, Confronting Empire
(2000): “He (Chomsky) has never wavered. He has never fallen into the
trap of saying, ‘Clinton will do better.’ Or ‘Nixon was bad but Carter
at least had a human rights presidency.’ There is a consistency of
substance, of posture, of outlook in his work.”
(Sounds good in theory but it seems Ahmad wasn’t aware Noam had voted for Clinton in 1992.)
“Decent human survival”
By 2004, Chomsky was far more public about his voting strategies,
saying stuff like this: “Anyone who says ‘I don’t care if Bush gets
elected’ is basically telling poor and working people in the country, ‘I
don’t care if your lives are destroyed’.”
And this:
"Despite the limited differences [between Bush and Kerry] both
domestically and internationally, there are differences. In a system of
immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."
Let’s step back
and recognize how the 2004 election proved that the high profile Left is
irrelevant. Chomsky and Howard Zinn were joined in the vocal, visible,
and vile Anybody-But-Bush ranks by “stars” like Michael Moore, Susan
Sarandon, Medea Benjamin, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, Manning Marable,
Naomi Klein, Phil Donahue, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin Sheen, Bruce
Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Cornel West, etc. etc.
News flash: John Kerry still lost.
The “poor and
working people in the country” that Chomsky mentions above are paying
ZERO attention to him or anyone like him... and that’s a much bigger
issue than which war criminal gets to play figurehead for the empire
over the next four years.
In 2008, Noam
continued to prove Eqbal Ahmad wrong by doling out advice like this: “I
would suggest voting against McCain, which means voting for Obama
without illusions.”
Which brings us to 2016.
After eight years of Obama’s repression, exploitation, and ecocide -- sans illusions, of course -- Chomsky is now declaring that the Republican Party and its presidential candidates are “literally a serious danger to decent human survival."
Thus, he is once again talking about “strategic voting,” even if it meant voting for Hillary Clinton -- which he would “absolutely” do!
Since most
humans’ memory cards appear to be wiped clean every four years, please
allow me to remind you how the original Clinton the Lesser Evil™ worked
out for what Chomsky terms “decent human survival.”
Criminal negligence
To begin, let’s all reflect back upon the years 1993 and 1994 -- when
President William Jefferson Clinton was enjoying the "advantage" of a
Democratically-controlled Congress.
In just two
years, the liberal hero abandoned his pledge to consider offering asylum
to Haitian refugees, backed away from his most high-profile campaign
issue: health care, and reneged on his promise to "take a firm stand"
against the armed forces' ban of gays and lesbians.
In 1993-4,
Clinton signed a little something called the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), presided over the invasion of Somalia, increased the
Pentagon budget by $25 billion, forced Jocelyn Elders to resign, dumped Lani Guinier,
ordered the bombing of Iraq and the Balkans, renewed the sanctions on
Iraq, and passed a crime bill that gave us more cops, more prisons, and
58 more offenses punishable by death.
All this came before Newt Gingrich and much-hyped Republican "revolution" in 1994… and I haven’t even gotten to the environment.
In the first
three years of the Clinton-Gore regime -- two of which, I remind you,
involved a Democratic House and Senate -- Bubba and his little green
buddy gave us fun stuff like: The passage of the salvage logging rider,
the continuation of the use of methyl bromide, the weakening of the
Endangered Species Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, the lowering of
grazing fees on land, the subsidizing of Florida's sugar industry, the
reversing the ban on the production and importation of PCBs, and
allowing the export of Alaskan oil.
When Clinton ran for re-election in 1996, David Brower, former president of the Sierra Club, wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times
called "Why I Won't Vote for Clinton." In this piece, Brower declared
that Clinton and Gore had "done more harm to the environment in three
years than Presidents Bush and Reagan did in 12 years." (That’s Bush the
Elder, not Bush the Lesser… for those of you scoring at home.)
One more time, with feeling:
Clinton and Gore did “more harm to the environment in three years than
Presidents Bush and Reagan did in 12 years.” When exactly does “decent
human survival” come into play here?
I could go on
and on about the rest of Bill Clinton’s reign, like the repeal of
welfare, a telecommunications bill that further narrowed the already
laughable parameters of public debate, the Defense of Marriage Act, but
I’ll just focus on one more lesser evil gem: The Anti-Terrorism &
Effective Death Penalty Act -- signed into law on April 24, 1996.
This USA PATRIOT
Act prequel contained provisions that Clinton himself admitted "make a
number of ill-advised changes in our immigration laws, having nothing to
do with fighting terrorism." This unconstitutional salvo severely
restricted habeas corpus and expanded the number of federal capital
crimes -- and the notorious PATRIOT Act is mostly an extension its legal
foundations.
For a little
more two-party context, consider that John Kerry voted for the
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996 and wrote
parts of the PATRIOT Act in 2001; Hillary voted for the PATRIOT Act in
2001; and both she and Obama voted to reauthorize it in 2005. Hooray for strategy!
Chomsky knows all this (and much more) but as mentioned, he “strategically” chose to vote for Bill Clinton
in 1992. I’ll bet the half million Iraqi children who died when Clinton
continued Bush the Elder’s sanctions appreciated the gesture.
To paraphrase myself: A vote for either major party is -- at best -- an act of criminal negligence.
The other 364.99 days
Why do I feel any of this matters? I believe for a man of Chomsky’s
stature on the “Left” to engage in talk of “strategic voting” is an
unnecessary and irresponsible act, one that indirectly contributes to
the misguided perception that a Democrat winning the election is somehow
a Pyrrhic victory of sorts.
I’ll say it yet again: If you plan to vote for yet another lesser (sic)
evil in 2016, go ahead. Kid yourself. Feel superior. Engage in
three-hour social media flame wars to defend your choice. Hold your nose
and pull the damn lever. Use Chomsky quotes to justify it (even though
he’s also called for “ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don’t
pay attention to the election cycle”).
And I’ll add
this yet again: Vote or no vote, all that matters is what you’re doing
the other 364.99 days. Make no mistake, if we continue allowing our
meager time and energy to be diverted into elections, we will one day be
asked why we made such a choice.
The human beings and all living things that come after us won’t care who we voted for in 2016, if they have no clean air to breathe, no clean water to use, and are stuck on a toxic, uninhabitable police state of a planet.
They’d probably just want to ask: Why did you stand by and let everything
be consumed or poisoned or destroyed? Why in the world did you focus so
much of your energy on elections and so little on action?
#shifthappens
Mickey Z. is the author of 13 books, most recently Occupy these Photos: NYC Activism Through a Radical Lens. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, you can “like” his Facebook page here and follow his blog here. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here.
"You’ll never BELIEVE who Chomsky could 'absolutely' vote for! (but her ex-president husband already knows)" by Mickey Z. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://worldnewstrust.com/you-ll-never-believe-who-chomsky-could-absolutely-vote-for-but-her-ex-president-husband-already-knows-mickey-z.
+Cindy Sheehan @Cindy_Sheehan I hope #Chomsky is not getting an early form of Alzheimer's
ReplyDeletehttp://cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com/2016/01/youll-never-believe-who-chomsky-could.html