Archive for April 2007

Noam Chomsky, speaking on April 17th’s Democracy Now! when asked about ‘hope for the future’:

I have a slightly more hopeful sense than Howard [Zinn] at least expressed, I suspect he agrees. It’s true that the country, that in terms of institutional structure – government for the wealthy and so on – there hasn’t been much change in two hundred years but there’s been enormous progress. I mean even in the last 40 years, since the 60s. Many rights have been won – rights for minorities, rights for women, rights of future generations (which is what the environmental movement is about), opposition to aggression is increased. The first solidarity movements in history began in the 1980s after centuries of European imperialism – no one ever thought of going to live in an Algerian village to protect the people from French violence, or in a Vietnamese village. Thousands of Americans were doing that in the 1980s in Reagan’s terrorist wars; it’s now extended over the whole world, there’s an International Solidarity Movement – the Global Justice movement, which meet annually in the World Social Forum are a completely new phenomenon. It’s true globalization among people, maybe the seeds for the first true International. People from all over the world, all walks of life, many ideas which are right on people’s minds and agenda are in fact being implemented about a participatory society – the kind of work that Michael Albert’s been doing … these are all new things. There’s been lots of bits – nothing’s ever totally new – there are bits and pieces of it in the past but the changes are enormous. And the same with opposition to aggression. After all the Iraq War’s the first war in hundreds of years of Western history, it’s the first one I can think of which was massively protested before it was officially launched. It actually was underway we’ve since learned, but it wasn’t officially underway – but it was huge, millions of people protesting it all over the world, so much so that the New York Times lamented that there’s a second superpower – the population. Well you know, that’s significant and I think gives good reason for hope. There are periods of regression, we’re now in a period of regression but if you look at the cycle over time, it’s upwards and there’s no limits it can’t reach.

From Traveling in Mark Twain (Richard Bridgman, 1987):

Having long pondered, without resolution, the meaning of what he had observed in his travels through the world, Twain told his old friend and clergyman Joe Twichell, in a letter of July 28, 1904, that at least “a part of each day—or night” the world vanished absolutely for him, leaving him no more than a thought drifting aimlessly in emptiness. At such moments it seemed to him that everything was “NON-EXISTENT. That is, that there is nothing . That there is no God and no universe; that there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought . And I am that thought.” (MSM , 30).

William Morris, writing in 1894, and published July 16th of that year in Justice:

To sum up then, the study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of the civilization which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past which would have no serious relation to the life of the present. But the consciousness of revolution stirring amidst our hateful modern society prevented me, luckier than many others of artistic perceptions, from crystalizing into a mere railer against ‘progress’ on the one hand, and on the other from wasting time and energy in any of the numerous schemes by which the quasi-artistic of the middle classes hope to make art grow when it has no longer any root, and thus I became a practical Socialist. (p.382; Penguin’s News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ‘How I became a Socialist’)