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.