Noam Chomsky Meets with Chavez in Venezuela

[Joanne98]

-- U.S. author, dissident intellectual, and Professor of Linguistics at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology Noam Chomsky met for the first time with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas and analyzed hemispheric politics during a nationally televised forum on Monday.

Chomsky is well known in Venezuela for his critiques of U.S. imperialism and support for the progressive political changes underway in Venezuela and other Latin American countries in recent years. President Chavez regularly references Chomsky in speeches and makes widely publicized recommendations of Chomsky's 2003 book, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance.

"Hegemony or survival; we opt for survival," said Chavez in a press conference to welcome Chomsky. He compared Chomsky's thesis to that of German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in the early 1900s, "Socialism or Barbarism," and referred to Chomsky as "one of the greatest defenders of peace, one of the greatest pioneers of a better world."

Through an interpreter, Chomsky responded, "I write about peace and criticize the barriers to peace; that's easy. What's harder is to create a better world... and what's so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created."

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http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4748

Picture at link.

[Cleita]

1. Good I hope he writes what he thinks of Chavez. If anyone can cut through

the crap propaganda and get to the truth it's Noam. I'm looking forward to what he has to say about it.

[Buzz Clik]

2. ditto

[timeforpeace]

5. Do you suppose it will be anything but praise?

[eridani]

6. Chomsky is well known for ripping the Palestinian leadership for--

--being corrupt and failing to do outreach to the rest of the world. He still, needless to say, advocates for Palestinian rights.

[Cleita]

7. If it's deserved, but Noam does not deal in namby pamby bias. He really

reports what's right and what's really wrong in Latin America, not what our State Department wants us to believe. I know. I used to live in South America and I was very aware that the facts were often quite different than what was reported in American newspapers. The problem is that if a dictator isn't one that is a good dog dictator to the USA they are going to be made into some kind of devil by our State Department. Chomsky never carried water for them when the truth was involved.

[d_b]

3. k&r

[StClone]

4. Hugo is not perfect, but in an imperfect world

He's working on both.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. The U.S. establishment has gone totally off the deep end about Chavez

One of the members of my church just published his report on being a delegate to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church USA, and he noted that while all sorts of countries sent friendship delegations, the group that wanted to come from Venezuela was barred from entering the U.S..

Yup, that's right. A delegation of church people from Venezuela was barred.

This is reminiscent of the bureaucratic mess that my parish had to go through to have the Episcopal Bishop of Cuba allowed to visit. (My parish has a five-year-old exchange relationship with the Diocese of Cuba.) Cuba had no problem letting him leave the country--it was the U.S. that was the problem.

We can be such a paranoid country sometimes, like when Canadian author Farley Mowatt was barred for joking about shooting down U.S. military planes with his hunting rifle.

[MasonJar]

9. Good! I love what Chavez is doing for his people against much corporate

hate and power. I do not care what our government now or former say about him. Chomsky is a great man too. He was to meet with Pat Tillman and learn some unvarnished truths. But Tillman was murdered. Very suspicious.