Hi Bob,

  My name is Dave.  I work as a math and chemistry tutor at a community
college in Michigan (Delta College).  I saw a little while ago that you
were thinking of leaving the list because of the poor level of discussion.
  I have one of your books (Masters of War), but haven't read it yet, so I
can't ask you about it.  Instead, maybe you would like to take a shot at
answering some questions I have about U.S. foreign policy:


1)  Do you feel that mainstream/orthodox historians adequately construct a
usable picture of U.S. history, in spite of "patriotic" bias?  Or, do
their omissions and misrepresentations of material lead to a picture that
is pretty much useless, a picture which ought to be discarded (except to
be studied the way we study the output of Soviet or Nazi "scholars")?


2)  I have often heard/read Chomsky suggesting that Reaganite policies
toward Latin America in the early 1980s were virtually identical to
Kennedy policies toward Vietnam, except that a significant part of the
population opposed Reagan and drove his foreign policy underground.  Could
you suggest some books on each period that one could use to make the
side-by-side comparison suggested by Chomsky?  How literally do you think
Chomsky means such statements?


3)  In _American Power and the New Mandarins_, Chomsky suggests that
intellectuals are particularly responsible for opposing atrocities
committed by their nation, since they have disproportionate access to
resources and they are (in theory) more articulate than the general
population.  He now regularly states that the idea of "speaking truth to
power" is completely useless, since the powerful already know what they
are doing and aren't interested in being lectured about it.  I do not
perceive a contradiction, necessarily, but it would appear that he is
recommending an emphasis on reaching the depoliticized populace instead of
trying to get the leadership to change its course--exactly the approach
that led to success in the Civil Rights movement, and to less success with
the anti-Vietnam War movement.  This makes sense to me when I look at Nazi
Germany, where the populace bought the lies of the leadership and made the
Holocaust and the Nazi war machine a reality.  Opposition from a public
able to engage in critical, independent thought would have relegated the
Nazi dreams to the circular file.  Such an independent-minded public seems
to be Chomsky's favored method for ending U.S. violent hegemony.
  My question, then, is what phenomena in history--efforts of individuals,
protest movements, labor struggles, political reforms, etc.--do you view
as having been most effective?  A related question would be:  What
approach do you recommend for today, since the problem of an enabling
populace is as much a problem for contemporary Amerika as it was in Nazi
Germany, in my view?


Dave W.

"... for if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass
of human beings ... would learn to think for themselves; and when once they
had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged
minority had no function, and they would sweep it away." - Emmanuel Goldstein