Are some of Louisiana Senator David Vitter's supporters domestic terrorists?

New Orleans, Louisiana--To put it mildly, whomever attempted to murder Brian Welsh--political adviser to porn star Stormy Daniels is trying to send him and the potential candidate a very obvious message: don't run against incumbent Republican Senator David Vitter. There's no other word but terrorism for this, domestic terrorism.

An act of domestic, political terrorism has happened once again on the streets of America and nobody's paying very much attention, if at all. This event happened the day before yesterday on the streets of New Orleans, but I have yet to see it get any play in the mainstream press. Yet, this is a very serious threat to the integrity of our political process, and the likelihood that this clown had sympathies with the Democratic Party are slim-to-none.

And so, this must come from the far right. Considering that it was probably a pipe-bomb, and that it was a solitary individual, the arrow already points decidedly to-the-right. Welsh stated yesterday:

“No one has seen anything like this before…not in such a dramatic fashion,” Welsh told ABC-26. “It’s too early for me to go pointing fingers. I’d like to hear officially what happened and then we can take it from there. If someone’s trying to send me a message like this, it’s not going to work.”

Daniels is considering a run for the Louisiana senate seat currently occupied by incumbent Republican David Vitter whose been linked to the “D.C Madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Vitter's cell phone number turned up numerous times in Palfrey's records. ("Political Advisor to Stormy Daniels Hit by Car Bomb," XBIX News Wire.com, 07.28.2009)

I'd agree that it's too early to point fingers at specific groups on the right, and I applaud his reaction of not being deterred, but they weren't doing this for the Democrats--there's no indication of this at all. But I do believe that this comes from the extremist right and that it's time to bring in the FBI, not that I care for the institution, but this is a high crime.

Welsh is wrong about "No one has seen anything like this before," this has happened, though not quite the same way, but it has been dramatic before; one just needs to recall the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the violence of the Civil Rights era, or even the attempt on George Wallace's life in 1972. Then there's government-sponsored terrorism. Sometime around October 6, 1976, the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist group Alpha 66 (backed by elements of our government) placed a bomb on a Cuban airliner:

All 73 people aboard died in the Oct. 6, 1976 disaster, including 19 members of

Cuba's junior national fencing team returning from Caracas, most of them
teen-agers.

Two Cubans were jailed in Venezuela for masterminding the attack. One was
Orlando Bosch, a physician who left the United States after he was paroled from
a 10-year prison sentence for firing a rocket at a Polish ship anchored in Miami.

The other was Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent who was trained as a
demolition expert for the Bay of Pigs.

Posada Carriles escaped from jail in Venezuela in 1985, reportedly disguised as a
priest. ("Bay of Pigs fiasco spawned anti-Castro plotters," CNN, 04.17.2001)

The CIA's great, but it's good to have friends in the Vatican too. These are just a few other examples, and there have been numerous others from the white supremacist movement over the years. No one would call anti-Castro Cubans leftists.

Alpha 66 was and still is allowed to operate from the swamps of Florida, incidentally. This is not to suggest that the New Orleans bomber was an anti-Castro Cuban (keep up with me, please), but to illustrate that there have been patterns of this criminal activity from the right many times before, and this isn't including the Oklahoma City bombing.

But the very recent murder by Scott Roeder (possibly inspired by the Army of God) of George Tiller, a Kansas abortion doctor, and the shooting-spree by white supremacist James von Brunn at the National Holocaust Museum were most certainly meant to instill fear in others and can be counted as acts of domestic terrorism from the far right. The key word here is "coercion," to prevent or to make someone do something that an individual or a groups wants as a result of the act. Yes, there is the possibility that this was some "lone nut" (either way, they were, let's be frank) who simply wanted to do it for personal reasons--certainly a possibility. Yeah?

Terrorism is known as a form of "asymmetrical warfare," in the parlance of counterterrorism, which jibes very closely with far right rhetoric and the formulation of the "lone wolf/lone-wolf fighter" approach advocated by such white hate luminaries as--once again--Tom Metzger and Alex Curtis. But who would benefit the most from a bombing that ended the campaign of a candidate running for the specific senate seat that porn star Stormy Daniels is setting her sights on?

The answer is pretty obvious: David Vitter. Granted, Daniels doesn't have a real chance of winning, and her candidacy is satirical--to remind Louisianans that Vitter used the prostitution services of the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey (aka the "DC Madam")--but there's nothing wrong with that, and her right to do so is protected under the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly, never mind the democratic right to run for public office. Whomever put the bomb in Welsh's car is an enemy of the democratic process itself and should be arrested and put on trial for their actions.

"Political Advisor to Stormy Daniels Hit by Car Bomb," XBIX News Wire.com, 07.28.2009: http://www.xbiznewswire.com/view.php?id=111062

ABC26's interview with Brain Welch from yesterday: http://www.abc26.com/videobeta/watch/?watch=4521787e-8dab-4de5-b48b-028fd8c72ac3&src=front

"Bay of Pigs fiasco spawned anti-Castro plotters," CNN, 04.17.2001: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/bay-of-pigs/plotters.htm

An interview with Dr. Noam Chomsky, from "Interpol Magazine," February 1995 (Part 2 of 2)

This was an interview conducted through the mail with Dr. Chomsky while I was finishing my degree in American History at Ball State University. Just two-months after I received his answers in the mail, we all witnessed the Oklahoma City bombing, and the first stirrings of the war on terror (really a domestic one against all of us). It's been a long road from the Spring of 1995. At that time, the internet was just starting to become accessible, and its impact on the political and cultural discourse is only now being realized. 1995 was a year when the "zine revolution" was occurring, and it was quickly-supplanted by the high-price of paper and the internet.

This interview was done for one of those little zines--my own--called "Interpol." I actually got copies of it in zine-central, the legendary Quimby's Queer Store in Chicago. It was pretty surreal going up to the Windy City and seeing those copies in the store (I never got paid, incidentally), it felt pretty good.

All that said, I would never trade the blog format, it's superior in every respect to that old digest format, and it's getting better all the time. Dr. Chomsky is a very friendly and encouraging person, and when he passes from this world, we will have lost a wonderful human being. Appreciate the flowers in life, they are fleeting. Try to be that person you admire, and strive to make a better world for all. That's the meaning of life.


Matt Janovic: Is "Leftism", as defined by the mainstream culture, more a problem of semantics, rather than a cohesive movement? It seems that throughout much of the 20th century, when groups worked and protested and acted for honest political change, the press and various "populist" elements resorted to labeling them "anarchists," "reds," "communists/commies," "pinkos," etc. . Do you agree with the analysis that often mob actions are stimulated from above, or are there complex social and economic reasons behind scapegoating and vigilantism?

Noam Chomsky: If I were a PR specialist trying to indoctrinate and marginalize people(as they do, quite consciously), I'd try to deprive all words of meaning, so that it's impossible even to think and talk coherently about things that matter (the powerful will continue in their own ways). To a large extent, that's happened. Personally, I keep away from words like "left," "liberal," "conservative," etc.

They have been so deprived of meaning as to become useless. Take "conservatism." The Reaganites were called "conservative." In fact, they were statist reactionaries; a genuine conservative would have turned over in his grave to hear the way the term is used today. There's also been a massive falsification of the "sacred texts." Take Adam Smith. We are supposed to worship at his shrine, but if anyone takes the trouble to read him, they'll find a very different picture from the official version handed down in the doctrinal system.

As for "mob action," it has so many different causes and sources that one can't generalize. CIO organizing and the civil rights movement were "mob action" from one point of view; the rampages of Hitler's organizations were too. Usually, when destructive mob action is stimulated from above, as it often is, it appeals to genuine social and economic concerns, manipulated for that purpose. Those are the tools in trade of demagogues, of every stripe. We've got plenty of experience with it throughout US history, dramatically right now.

Matt Janovic: What can the average person learn from the fall of the Soviet Union?

Noam Chomsky: The simplest lesson is a familiar one: in a conflict, the more powerful adversary tends to win. Europe began to separate into two parts in the 15th century, the West beginning to develop, the East becoming its "third world." That continued right to the early years of this century--for much of Eastern Europe, until 1945. There are some rules of the international game: (!) service areas have to fulfill their function, not get uppity about following an independent path; (2) if they do take off on their own and turn out to be successful in terms that appeal to others in the same boat, they really have to be crushed--in official rhetoric, they are a "virus" that might "infect others," a "rotten apple" that might "spoil the barrel."

If it's a speck in the Caribbean, it takes a weekend. If it's 1/6 of the world, it takes 70 years. But the logic is rather similar; and not surprisingly, much of Eastern Europe is returning to its earlier origins. Sectors that were part of the industrial West, like the Czech Republic, are returning to that status; parts that were basically service areas are returning to the typical third world model. There are all sorts of nuances and complications, but that's a fair approximation.

It's worth stressing that despite much pretense, Western leaders had no serious objections to Stalin's awesome crimes, any more than they had fundamental objections to Hitler or Mussolini, or to Saddam Hussein, or to a host of similar and lesser monsters. On that, the documentary record is very clear, and one can learn about it in arcane monographs (or the marginalised dissident literature). In a really free society, it would be on the front pages and in the school texts, along with much else that is consigned to the memory hole, as Politically Incorrect (in the operative sense of this ridiculous term).

Matt Janovic: Dr. Chomsky, what kind of direct improvements would you envision for the American worker in the workplace, if there was more democracy in most institutions of our society? How do you think that could be brought about?

Noam Chomsky: Right now [1995] one can't look for any improvements; the immediate problem is to preserve the rights that were finally achieved at least in part in the 1930s, after a century of bitter struggle, and have been eroding ever since. They are now under very sever and cruel assault, not just for working people: the same is true of family values, as I mentioned. A traditional stance within the US labor movement and intellectual life, as American as apple pie, is that industrial democracy must be a central component of operative democracy.

If the central decision-making institutions of a society--in production, commerce, finance, ideology, etc.--are in the hands of unaccountable private power, then democracy is a thin reed at best. That's traditional and mainstream. Today it sounds exotic, but that's because the American tradition has largely been demolished, also being "Politically Incorrect." How can democratic practices be extended to the central institutions of the society? There's only one answer, always: the same way they were slowly extended to governmental functions. That was never a gift; it was the result of committed popular organization and action.

Matt Janovic: In a truly democratic society, what do you think our educational system would be like?

Noam Chomsky: Education in a democratic society would try to encourage the natural curiosity and independence of mind of children, instead of suppressing it and channelling them into obedience and conformity. It would celebrate the traditional values of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, which held that teaching should not be like filling a vessel with water, but helping a plant grow in its own way by allowing it to have proper food and light. These traditional conservative values are, of course, anathema to contemporary statist reactionaries.

Matt Janovic: Lastly, what is your idea of international humanism, and do you believe that to impose Western democratic and humanistic ideals (as the Chinese communists/nationalists loyal to the party argue) on non-Western nations is cultural imperialism?

Noam Chomsky: The idea that the West tries to impose "western democratic and humanistic ideals" on the rest of the world is one of the most ridiculous scams that the commissar class has indulged in. Western leaders, including intellectual elites, are dedicated to undermining these professed ideals at home, and centuries of brutal history show how they have "fostered" them elsewhere. Take simply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD).

The official line is that we courageously defend its universality, fighting off the "cultural relativists" of backward countries who say it doesn't fully extend to them. As even a moment's attention will show, the US flatly rejects about half of the UD even in principle, and grossly violates the rest. That's not controversial; the documentation is readily available. But for the doctrinal managers, it doesn't matter: what is important is ideological warfare, not truth or honesty--in fact, those are the values that have to be undermined.

Link to Part 1: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2007/05/interview-with-dr-noam-chomsky-from.html#links

End of Part 2 of 2 (and statement of intellectual ownership): This interview is the intellectual property of Dr. Noam Chomsky and Matt Janovic, in toto. Permission to reprint, quote, or reproduce can be obtained through written permission from the authors. Quotes of up-to four lines are acceptable without permission. All rights reserved as of 2007, Noam Chomsky and Matt Janovic.

An interview with Dr. Noam Chomsky, from "Interpol Magazine," February 1995 (Part 1 of 2)

This was an interview conducted through the mail with Dr. Chomsky while I was finishing my degree in American History at Ball State University. Just two-months after I received his answers in the mail, we all witnessed the Oklahoma City bombing, and the stirrings of the war on terror (really a domestic one against all of us). It's been a long road from the Spring of 1995. At that time, the internet was just starting to become accessible, and its impact on the political and cultural discourse is only now being realized.

1995 was a year when the "zine revolution" was occurring, and it was quickly-supplanted by the high-price of paper and the internet. This interview was done for one of those little zines--my own--called "Interpol." I actually got copies of it in zine-central, the legendary Quimby's Queer Store in Chicago. It was pretty surreal going-up to the Windy City and seeing those copies in the store (I never got paid, incidentally), it felt pretty good.

All that said, I would never trade the blog format, it's superior in every respect to that old digest format, and it's getting better all the time. Dr. Chomsky is a very friendly and encouraging person, and when he passes from this world, we will have lost a wonderful human being. Appreciate the flowers in life, they are fleeting. Try to be that person you admire, and strive to make a better world for all. That's the meaning of life.


Matt Janovic: Dr. Chomsky, in the past you've made comments on the importance of the FBI's COINTEPROs (Counterintelligence Programs) against the Black Panthers and the multi-faceted "New Left" as having a preponderant effect on the demise of these groups in the 1960s and early 1970s--do you feel that the effect of this element of American History is overlooked by most historians?

Noam Chomsky: There is no doubt that this material has been marginalized--by historians, the media, and the intellectual community general. Merely to give one personal example, I have a long article on "domestic terrorism" that is still unpublished after 15 years, apart from excerpts way at the margins. Recently, a leading criminologist asked for it for an anthology, but was finally unable to work it in (not his judgement; he wanted it).But the story is far more dramatic. Simply consider the relative attention given to Watergate and to COINTELPRO. It's a very revealing comparison. They were disclosed at the very same time. COINTELPRO was vastly more significant: it was a program by the national political police, acting on the highest authority through three administrations, to undermine and destroy independent thought and political action; its methods reached as far as Gestapo-style political assassination, under Nixon. These facts are not contested. In contrast, Watergate was a tea party.

For unknown reasons some tenth-rate burglars ransacked a Democratic Party headquarters; one minor part of COINTELPRO was massive disruption of a legal political party, which has the same status as the Democrats in our constitutional system, except that it has no private wealth behind it (the Socialist Workers Party)--that single episode is far more significant than all of Watergate. There was great outrage over Nixon's "enemy list"; nothing happened to anyone on it, as I know personally, since I was on it. But also on it were the head of IBM, McGeorge Bundy, etc., and to call powerful people bad names in private is a scandal that undermines the foundations of the republic. In contrast, to assassinate a Black Panther organizer in an FBI-organized early morning police raid, killing him in bed (probably drugged), is quite OK. And on, and on.

Now, simply check the reaction to these simultaneous disclosures. Ask yourself how Watergate and COINTELPRO figure into the political culture and history crafted by the privileged and educated, and what the impact has been on the repeated disclosure of these very startling and revealing facts. There is only one conclusion: it's a crime to annoy the powerful, but it's fine to terrorize and disrupt the lives of the weak. It could hardly be more clear that that is the dominant value of the political-intellectual culture.

MJ: In past interviews, you've refrained from any call for specific action, yet your analysis of the present domestic and world situation regarding the rights of individuals seems bleak. In the face of such widespread oppression and exploitation by various transnational corporations (usually implemented by the apparatus of domestic governments), why do you generally refrain from doing so?

NC: I don't refrain from calls to specific action. I've undertaken plenty myself, and recommend them to others. What I don't do is stand up on a podium and say: Do This or That. I don't feel I have any right to do so. What I try to do--whether successfully or not others can judge--is to lay out the situation as I see it, encourage others to inquire with independent minds, and when they draw their own conclusions, to act to change what I am convinced they will see as dangerous and often horrifying developments. If asked about specific actions, I always try to answer. And as I mentioned, I've undertaken plenty myself, including organizing direct resistance.

MJ: How did the discussions on the Donahue/Pozner show [Ed-the short-lived political talk show from the early-1990s] on CNBC come about? Did the main host, Mr. Donahue, have any serious problems taking you on a network that is mostly owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor to the Pentagon?

NC: My impression is that Phil Donohue would be very pleased to have people like me on his show regularly, and to get enough corporate sponsorship (it's not easy to get any other, in our system of private tyranny) to allow such discussions to be widely heard. My impression also is that it's not easy even for a person of his stature in the mainstream media to break the rigid rules of Political Correctness imposed by private power, largely. As to whether these impressions are accurate in this particular case, you'd have to inquire elsewhere, of course.

MJ: This is probably pretty pedestrian to you by now, but: do you feel as an older man that youth culture can have a serious and positive impact towards humanistic thought and action, or is it just another social dynamic that we can only exert a minimal amount of control over? Specifically, I'm talking about non-conformist rock culture.

NC: I'm too ignorant to comment, frankly. My impression--and again it's only that--is that the rock culture has had an effect on getting young people to think and act independently. But like the youth culture generally, it's been readily absorbed into the vast system of private power, which wants to distort it to serve its own ends of commercialization, separation of people from one another, and so on. How these tendencies play out, others who know better than I would have to say.

MJ: Why do you think that Europe has maintained a greater tradition of Leftism than the United States.

NC: Europe has been rather different from the US in many respects. As England has fallen more into the US orbit, there are by now quite striking differences between an even broader Anglo-American model and a continental European-Japanese model. It shows up quite clearly in many features of the societies. Take family values: they have been under severe attack for the past 15 years in the Anglo-American model, while support systems have been encouraged and sustained these values in the contrasting model. This has been studied in some depth right in the mainstream, and the results are pretty striking, but you'd have to find all that out. I have some references and comment in the January and February issues of Z Magazine.But this is only one facet. It's even recognized by the Courts. Thus, the Sixth Court of Appeals in a 1994 decision denying legal protection to older workers thrown out of their jobs takes explicit not that "Unlike law and social policy in many European countries, the laws of the United States do not prohibit" actions by owners undertaken for private profit, whatever the effect on workers and communities. In brief, the prevailing values here are that what counts is private power, not human beings. The Court's decision is accompanied by a good deal of utter nonsense about "legal and economic theory," but the distinction the Court draws is quite real, and has been for a long time. US labor history, for example, is unusually violent. Even the right-wing press in England was appalled, for many decades, at the brutal treatment of American workers by the government security forces mobilized by the owners.

What are the reasons? It's a complicated story, but in part it reflects the fact that American society began as a kind of "blank slate," once the native population was exterminated or driven away. It therefore reflected the quite sharply the values of those who had domestic power, business interests overwhelmingly. Of course, they never believed in a free market, and still don't: the US is also unusual in its record of extreme protectionism and public subsidy to private power through the state system ("welfare for the rich," we would call it, if honesty were permitted).

That's the primary reason for the very rapid economic growth of the US. But though the business world has always demanded ample state protection from market discipline, and still does, they've naturally demanded such discipline be imposed rigorously on the poor and defenseless at home and abroad, and have relied extensively on state power to insure that result as well. In societies where industrial capitalism grew out of existing social networks, support systems, traditional societies that recognized a "right to life," etc., the edges of the system were softer, a labor movement was able to survive and grow, and a social contract was achieved that is scarcely known here.

In an era of transnational capital, those systems are eroding everywhere; that's a large part of the perceived value of globalization of production and the huge expansion of speculative financial capital. The whole industrial world is leveling downward under consciously undertaken social policy, for reasons that are well understood. That's not inevitable; contrary to their illusions, these are human decisions taken within human institutions with their own historically contingent power relations, not laws of physics (let alone economics). But it is entirely natural as private tyranny increases its sway worldwide.

On the other hand, there are respects in which the US is much more free than other societies. Take freedom of speech, for example. Since the 1960s, at least, the US leads the world in defending this fundamental right--and it didn't just "happen"; the great 1964 victory at the Supreme Court was part of the civil rights movement, to mention one example. There's also a streak of independence and a lack of deference and class subordination in American social life that's very refreshing, and different from most of the industrial world. More generally, it's a complicated story, and one should be wary of easy formulas.

End of Part 1 (and statement of intellectual ownership): This interview is the intellectual property of Dr. Noam Chomsky and Matt Janovic. Permission to reprint, quote, or reproduce can be obtained through written permission from the authors. All rights reserved as of 2007, Noam Chomsky and Matt Janovic.