Having never had the luck of the draw of two such disparate elements as “Chomsky” and “Zombie apocalypse” in a title — let alone subject matter from a news story based on reality — I was drawn to this article like iron to a magnet. It struck an all-too familiar chord. As a child growing up while the Cold War was hot, there has always been a feeling in the U.S. that you were being made afraid of a named and yet faceless threat: Pinkos, the Red Menace, Muslim terrorists. And they were always out there somewhere. As Mr. Chomsky points out in the article excerpted below, there’s a reason for that. — Fe Bongolan
Noam Chomsky: Zombies are the new Indians and slaves in white America’s collective nightmare
By Scott Kaufman for Raw Story
February 14, 2014
During a question-and-answer session with students on February 7, 2014, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky was asked why there’s a cultural preoccupation with “the zombie apocalypse” in United States.
“My guess is,” Chomsky said, “that it’s a reflection of fear and desperation. The United States is an unusually frightened country, and in such circumstances, people concoct, maybe for escape or relief, [narratives] in which terrible things happen.”
“Fear in the United States is actually a pretty interesting phenomenon,” Chomsky continued. “It actually goes back to the colonies — there’s a very interesting book by a literary critic, Bruce Franklin, called War Stars. It’s a study of popular literature…from the earliest days to the present, and there are a couple of themes that run through it that are pretty striking.”
“For one thing,” Chomsky said, “one major theme in popular literature is that we’re about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy, and at the last moment we’re saved by a superhero, or a super-weapon — or, in recent years, high school kids going to the hills to chase away the Russians.”
According to Chomsky, “there’s a sub-theme: it turns out this enemy, this horrible enemy that’s going to destroy us, is someone we’re oppressing. So you go back to the early years, the terrible enemy was the Indians.”