{"id":74364,"date":"2014-02-18T16:00:19","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T21:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=74364"},"modified":"2014-02-19T09:24:47","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T14:24:47","slug":"noam-chomsky-on-the-zombie-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/noam-chomsky-on-the-zombie-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"Noam Chomsky on the Zombie Apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em><\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky: Zombies are the new Indians and slaves in white America\u2019s collective nightmare<\/h3>\n

By Scott Kaufman for Raw Story<\/a><\/em><\/strong>
\nFebruary 14, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Noam
Noam Chomsky; photo by Duncan Rawlinson.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During a question-and-answer session with students on February 7, 2014, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky was asked why there\u2019s a cultural preoccupation with \u201cthe zombie apocalypse\u201d in United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy guess is,\u201d Chomsky said, \u201cthat it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFear in the United States is actually a pretty interesting phenomenon,\u201d Chomsky continued. \u201cIt actually goes back to the colonies \u2014 there\u2019s a very interesting book by a literary critic, Bruce Franklin, called War Stars. It\u2019s a study of popular literature\u2026from the earliest days to the present, and there are a couple of themes that run through it that are pretty striking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor one thing,\u201d Chomsky said, \u201cone major theme in popular literature is that we\u2019re about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy, and at the last moment we\u2019re saved by a superhero, or a super-weapon \u2014 or, in recent years, high school kids going to the hills to chase away the Russians.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Chomsky, \u201cthere\u2019s a sub-theme: it turns out this enemy, this horrible enemy that\u2019s going to destroy us, is someone we\u2019re oppressing. So you go back to the early years, the terrible enemy was the Indians.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cThe colonists, of course, were the invaders\u2026whatever you think about the Indians, they were defending their own territory.\u201d After a brief discussion of the Declaration of Independence, Chomsky notes that one of the complaints listed in it is that King George \u201cunleashed against [the colonists] the merciless Indian savages, whose known way of warfare is torture and destruction and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that\u2026knew quite well that it was the merciless English savages whose known way of warfare was destruction and torture and terror, and taking over the country and driving out and exterminating the natives. But it\u2019s switched in the Declaration of Independence,\u201d Chomsky said, indicating that this is yet another example of Franklin\u2019s thesis that oppressed people become, in the popular imagination of the oppressors, the \u201cterrible, awesome enemy\u201d bent on the destruction of America.<\/p>\n

The full article, with video of Chomsky’s response, can be found here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74364"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}