The Gown – student newspaper at Queen's University Belfast.

NEWS: Noam Chomsky gives free talk in Belfast

Last night Noam Chomsky gave a free talk to a packed St Mary’s College in Belfast, presented by the Féile an Phobail festival. Professor Chomsky, perhaps the world’s most pre-eminent linguist (a popular maxim describing Chomsky as being “to linguistics what Einstein was to physics”) but more famously the most prominent American political dissident writing today, has written over 70 works on topics ranging from left-wing political theory to criticism of American foreign policy.

BY PADRAIC GRANT

The greater part of his talk was focused on the latter issue; overall his speech lasted around an hour and a half and went into a chronological history of American actions abroad in great detail, with detours into one of Chomsky’s greatest concerns: the manipulation of the mass media to indoctrinate the population as a whole.

The most impressive aspects of the talk was its uncompromising structure and content. Eschewing cheap slogans or appeals to emotion, Chomsky proceeded from example to example with clinical precision, putting each piece in its place and leaving it to the audience to draw some obvious conclusions. Moving from the US Marshall Plan in Europe, for example, to the overthrow of the democratically-elected Marxist and Chilean President Salvador Allende in favour of Augusto Pinochet, the point was made clear: the USA worked to implement its hegemonic power by making sure those leaders it considered friendly were kept in power by any means necessary. Indeed, one criticism that could be made of the speech is also a great strength: the sheer amount of examples he used was at times overwhelming, but of course this (and the fact that he goes into even greater detail in his books and articles) only serves to prove his arguments are drawn from factual sources rather than idealistic political theory.

Following the talk, a question and answer session was held. Some of the more international-based queries saw Professor Chomsky give expansive answers, one particularly interesting segment seeing him delve into the criminalisation of the black population in America, which Chomsky described as a de facto continuation of slavery. Some questions hit closer to home, with two directed squarely at Gerry Adams who was sitting near the front of the crowd. Firstly, Chomsky was asked what he felt about revolutionary movements who became subsumed into the implementation of neo-liberal economic policies, and secondly what he felt of supposedly progressive movements assisting efforts to privatise services and close down schools. Chomsky answered the first by denouncing any movement which felt it could change the system from within, explaining that he felt this was a route to reformism and compromise. The latter was felt to be too local an issue for him to comment on specifically, but Mr Adams was allowed to voice a rebuttal, where he argued that his party was dedicated to progressive reforms in the education sector, including the planned abolition of the 11 plus. Due to the expansive nature of Chomsky’s answers the amount of questions asked was only six, but his far-reaching explanations made up for this small number.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 6:39 pm and is filed under News, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.