Noam Chomsky compares right-wing media to Nazi Germany in San Francisco visit

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I happened on this YouTube video where famous intellectual, author, and spokesperson on the media and politics Noam Chomsky talks about right-wing media during a recent visit to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club.



I've always felt Chomsky had his pulse on the zeitgeist of what's wrong in America. My favorite was his take on mainstream media, and while it was over a decade ago, it still applies today in a way. For example, he wrote:

The elite media set a framework within which others operate. If you are watching the Associated Press, who grind out a constant flow of news, in the mid-afternoon it breaks and there is something that comes along every day that says "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front page." The point of that is, if you’re an editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out what the news is, or you don’t want to think about it anyway, this tells you what the news is.

And that's still true today, except the New York Times is joined by Google. As a blogger I tend to use Google Trends with a passion. But it reflects what is news at the moment - what people are searching for. More democratic? Yes, but important news can get burried under the weight of too many searches for Megan Fox.

At the Commonwealth Club Chomsky compared right-wing media to Nazi Germany. Mediaite has a partial transcription what Chomsky said:

the memory that comes to my mind — I don’t want to press the analogy too hard, but I think it’s worth thinking about — is late Weimar Germany. There were people with real grievances, and the Nazis gave them an answer. ‘It’s the fault of the Jews and the Bolsheviks and we’ve got to protect ourselves from them, and that will take care of them.’ And you know what happened…

[...]Germany in the 1920s was at the peak of Western civilization. A decade later, it was at the pits of human history.

Unless an answer can be given to these people, unless they can be led to understand what’s really happening to them, we could be in for trouble.

He's right. I continuously say and write this, but we've got to fix this economy if only to make sure political unrest does not set in. I think part of what fuels the couch potato conservatives is that they aren't making ends meet like many in America. But their response to the economic problem has been to become anti - government. How far that goes is anyone's guess.