Philip Smith: During Sunday's SuperBowl, the drug czar's office ran a series of paid ads attempting to link drug use and the "war on terrorism." If you use drugs, the ads said, you support terrorism. What is your take on this?

Noam Chomsky: Terrorism is now being used and has been used pretty much the same way communism was used. If you want to press some agenda, you play the terrorism card. If you don't follow me on this, you're supporting terrorism. That is absolutely infantile, especially when you consider that much of the history of the drug trade trails right behind the CIA and other US intervention programs. Going back to the end of the second world war, you see -- and this is not controversial, it is well-documented -- the US allying itself with the French Mafia, resulting in the French Connection, which dominated the heroin trade through the 1960s. The same thing took place with opium in the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War, and again in Afghanistan during the war against the Russians.

Smith: The cocaine trade is the primary given reason for US intervention in Colombia's civil war. In your opinion, to what degree is the drug angle a pretext? And a pretext for what?

Chomsky: Colombia has had the worst human rights record in the hemisphere in the last decade while it has been the leading recipient of US arms and training for the Western Hemisphere and now ranks behind only Israel and Egypt worldwide. There exists a very close correlation that holds over a long period of time between human rights violations and US military aid and training. It's not that the US likes to torture people; it's that it basically doesn't care. For the US government, human rights violations are a secondary consequence. In Colombia, as elsewhere, human rights violations tend to increase as the state tries to violently repress opposition to inequality, oppression, corruption, and other state crimes for which there is no political outlet. The state turns to terror -- that's what's been happening in Colombia for a long time, since before there was a Colombian drug trade. Counterinsurgency has been going on there for 40 years; President Kennedy sent a special forces mission to Colombia in the early 1960s. Their proposal to the Colombian government was recently declassified, and it called for "paramilitary terror" -- those are their words -- against what it called known communist proponents. In Colombia, that meant labor leaders, priests, human rights activists, and so on. Colombian military manuals in the 1960s began to reflect this advice. In the last 15 years, as the US has become more deeply involved, human rights violations are up considerably.

On a more serious point, suppose that the drug pretext were legitimate. Suppose that the US really is trying to get rid of drugs in Colombia. Does Colombia then have the right to fumigate tobacco farms in Kentucky? They are producing a lethal substance far more dangerous than cocaine. More Colombians die from tobacco-related illnesses than Americans die from cocaine. Of course, Colombia has no right to do that.

Smith: Domestically, state, local, and federal governments have spent tens of billions of dollars on the "war on drugs," yet illicit drugs remain as available, as pure, and as cheap as ever. If this policy is not accomplishing its stated goal, what is it accomplishing? Is there some sort of latent agenda being served?

Chomsky: They have known all along that it won't work, they have good evidence from their own research studies showing that if you want to deal with substance abuse, criminalization is the worst method. The RAND report did a cost-effectiveness analysis of various drug strategies and it found that the most effective approach by far is prevention and treatment. Police action was well below that, and below police action was interdiction, and at the bottom in terms of cost-effectiveness were out-of-country efforts, such as what the US is doing in Colombia. President Nixon, by contrast, had a significant component for prevention and treatment that was effective.

US domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control. The economic policies of the last 20 years are a rich man's version of structural adjustment. You create a superfluous population, which in the US context is largely poor, black, and Hispanic, and a much wider population that is economically dissatisfied. You read all the headlines about the great economy, but the facts are quite different. For the vast majority, these neoliberal policies have had a negative effect. With regard to wages, we have only now regained the wage levels of 30 years ago. Incomes are maintained only by working longer and harder, or with both adults in a family working. Even the rate of growth in the economy has not been that high, and what growth there is has been highly concentrated in certain sectors.

If most people are dissatisfied and others are useless, you want to get rid of the useless and frighten the dissatisfied. The drug war does this. The US incarceration rate has risen dramatically, largely because of victimless crimes, such as drug offenses, and the sentences are extremely punitive. The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it frightens everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or terrorism, people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the menace. It is hard to believe that these consequences aren't understood. They are there for anyone to see. Back when the current era of the drug war began, Senator Moynihan paid attention to the social science, and he said if we pass this law we are deciding to create a crime wave among minorities.

For the educated sectors, all substance abuse was declining in the '90s, whether we're talking about cocaine or cigarette smoking or eating red meat. This was a period in which cultural and educational changes were taking place that led the more educated sectors to reduce consumption of all sorts of harmful substances. For the poorer sectors, on the other hand, substance abuse remained relatively stable. Looking at these curves, we see that what will happen, it is obvious you will be going after poor sectors. Some legal historians have predicted that tobacco would be criminalized because it is associated with poorer and less-educated people. If you go to McDonald's, you see kids smoking cigarettes, but I haven't seen a graduate student who smoked cigarettes for years. We are now beginning to see punitive consequences related to smoking, and of course the industry has seen this coming for years. Phillip Morris and the rest have begun to diversify and to shift operations abroad.

Smith: Many ardent drug reformers are self-identified Libertarians. As an anarchist -- I assume it is fair to call you that -- what is your take on libertarianism?

Chomsky: The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was libertarian socialism. In the US, which is a society much more dominated by business, the term has a different meaning. It means eliminating or reducing state controls, mainly controls over private tyrannies. Libertarians in the US don't say let's get rid of corporations. It is a sort of ultra-rightism.

Having said that, frankly, I agree with them on a lot of things. On the drug issue, they tend to oppose state involvement in the drug war, which they correctly regard as a form of coercion and deprivation of liberty. You may be surprised to know that some years ago, before there were any independent left journals, I used to write mainly for the Cato Institute journal.

Smith: What should be done about drug use and the drug trade?

Chomsky: I agree with RAND. It is a problem. Cocaine is not good for you. If you want to deal with substance abuse, the approach should be education, prevention, rehabilitation and so forth. That is what we have successfully done with other substances. We did not have to outlaw tobacco to see a reduction in use; that is the result of cultural and educational changes.

One must always be cautious in recommending social policy because we can't know what will happen, but we should be exploring steps toward decriminalization. Let's undertake this seriously and see what happens. An obvious place to begin is with marijuana. Decriminalization of marijuana would be a very sensible move. And we need to begin shifting from criminalization to prevention. Prevention and treatment are how we should be addressing hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Direct Link: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12420

Philip Smith edits The Week Online for DRCNet.org. Website: http://www.drcnet.org/

Newshawk: Jim J.
Source: AlterNet (US Web)
Author: Philip Smith, DRCNet
Published: February 14, 2002
Copyright: 2002 Independent Media Institute
Website: http://www.alternet.org/
Feedback: http://www.alternet.org/discuss/

Quite interesting reading -- the actual administrative records of political repression.

Well now, think of how it would feel to go deep into the DEA files on our movement here. To read ideas crafted by the finest minds in the DEA or ONDCP in the war on pot.

It's not so different.

I met people in the Soviet dissident movement and heard their stories of the daily task of organizing an illegal resistance and surviving searches of their homes, being fired from their jobs, trials, prisons, camps and the experience of having imprisoned friends and family and having a movement around that.

This is exactly what is going on here now. It's so much like that, it's spooky.

There are criminals in the world who deserve to have their homes searched and deserve to be subjected to organized social control.

But they are not the people in this marijuana movement. The people in this marijuana movement are really, in terms of morality and intentionality towards their own country, just like the Soviet dissidents. Decent peole with decent intentions who see things differently, in a way that is too different for the society to tolerate.

The techniques being applied to express this lack of tolerance seem like direct copies of the Soviet techniques used to control their resistant population. The Drug Free Workplace is a completely Soviet animal. The employer becomes responsible for delivering propaganda regarding private behavior to the workers, and for delivering the names of workers in violation of the restrictions on private behavior to the government.

Those were the duties of employers under the Soviet system. That was precisely the means of political control enacted upon the population. That was the exact mechanism by which the Soviet system of political control functioned on a daily basis.

When I was applying for an NSF grant I learned that I had to sign a document promising to propagandanize and inform on any potential employees in the name of the Drug War. This is called Drug Free Workplace Certification.

This is how the Soviet workplace functioned. The personal, professional and political life of a person were welded together by the presence of a Communist Party Officer in every place of employment, who made sure that the private and professional behavior of each and every worker was in line with the accepted Communist ideology.

For example, in my research on the Soviet dissidents, I found many documents on file that were denunciations of people at work for things they had said outside of work. As a result of being denounced at work for things they had said outside of work, they were often fired from their jobs AND reported to the KGB. Some of them ended up the subjedt of official investigations and then... to the camps.

The requirement of the Drug Free Workplace is that I must report to the federal government the names and employees numbers of any of my employees caught using drugs outside of work. So I am being inducted into service as the Party Officer in this case.

This is the whole idea behind workplace marijuana testing too. We have a political war against marijuana users going on, and all employers have been inducted into service in that political war, and they are supposed to fulfill the role of Party Officer by testing people for how they behave in their private lives, compare that with political standard made up by the government, and use that judgment to determine their professional futures.

The War on Drugs is a very Soviet animal, and I don't think Chomsky is ever going to capable of arguing against it effectively because he can't ever bring himself to use the Soviet name as anything other than some kind of victim of evil American capitalistic machinations.

Who was Bukharin? The foremost Marxist-Leninist theoretician of his age.

What happened to him? Executed on some trumped-up conspiracy during the Stalin purges.

What was the reason for this?

Because the Communists did not want Marxism-Leninism to be a living dynamic set of ideas capable of normal natural intellectual evolution.

They want the entire Marxist dialectic frozen in time to exactly where Saint Lenin left it.

The entire Marxist theoetical intellectual leadership of the Communist party was murdered by the Communist Party.

After Bukharin was killed, nobody was allowed to take his work and extend it or develop it, because that was called "Bukharinism" and was grounds for being expelled from the Party and fired from your job.

It's very evil of Noam not to teach THIS part of history to his followers.

The Soviet Union didn't even allow the free development of Marxism-Leninism, that is what a sick evil entity the Soviet Communist Party became.

And the prohibition on Bukharinism lasted all the way up until Glasnost. Only after Gorbachev was it even allowed to be discussed in print what had happened to the greatest Marxist theoretician in their entire history.

Hope Abandoned by Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband, the brilliant poet Osip mandelstam, most likely died in a transit camp awaiting shipment to a labor colony in Vladivostok, although she was never able to find out for sure what really happened to himn after the KGb took him into their custody one morning in 1938.

Both of these books are filled with some very bitter emotions but they are both written by enormous intellects with the strength to pierce the heart of the Soviet beast and open the monster up for surgical exploration of this stunning episode of inhumanity.

I think that Chomsky's lies about the Soviet Union's history are doing harm to America because young people are not really being taught the true techniques of autoritaroian control.

That's one reason why we are falling vicitm to these techniques as they are being applied in America.

Chomsky is doing a disservice to his OWN cause because he's not even giving his followers the knowledge tools necessary to understand where why and how America is becoming the next Soviet Union.

Chomsky has been criticized for not focusing much on the depredations of the former, late-and-unlamented "Second World" (Communism). I will not say yea or nay about it. I'll just say that his commentaries concerning the depredations of the "First World" (Corporate State Capitalism) have been bang on target in my book.

Now just think for one clear second. Of course they're going to miss it. Because it was a totalitarian country. So it represents their TOTAL experience of the past. I don't think you understand what effect that has on them now, how it is to live in that huge 75 year shadow that blacked out everything -- EVERYTHING -- but the Bolshevik interpretation of marx and Engels from any kind of social communication.

The Communists strangled any other form of culture or history or politics or social thought whatsoever that didn't fit in their narrow ideological niche.

For 75 years.

In America we can look back over the last 75 years and, whether we are socialists or capitalists or Christians or mystics or postmoderns or moderns or conservatives or Atlanteans or marijuana activists -- there is some tradition of thought recorded in the past, some thread of development that we can attach to, soime leaders we can look up to, some books we can collect.

Something we can identify with OTHER than the totality of the United States of America and the dominant culture of that entity.

In these countries where people are nostalgic for the old days -- they have no such options. the ONLY thing about the past they can be remembered at all is the Soviet version, because all of the people and records of any other way of thinking were OBLITERATED by the Communists.

I don't think you can appreciate the deforming effect that still has to this day on the national psyche, on the normal ability to develop and evolve a culture natural to a people and a time.

You have all the advantages in America of being able to identify, and identify with, the people and ideas in the past in this country that formed the foundation of the ideas that you yourself want to build on and evolve today.

In the former Communist countries -- all of those kinds of people were either murdered or silenced in other ways.

You don't appreciate what you have here, and that makes me very sad.

A culture's wealth accrues over time, and the people of the Soviet region were brutally and systematically robbed of any natural culktural development for 75 years.

Now the one and only past they have access to is the Soviet past.

A totalitarian past leaves an enormous shadow on the imaginations of the future generations.

KING: Abstinence. You mean, programs to influence it?

MAHER: Right. Because it's been proven, the facts are in, that abstinence alone does not stop teen pregnancy. You have to have the condoms available, too. But that's where they read science so selectively. Global warming, we're not sure. You know, that's a myth, that needs more science.

But the missile shield, that one we know, which never had worked, that one we know we can go forward on. Marijuana, another thing that they've done tests on, you know, every administration does the test. It always comes back the same thing. It makes you eat cookie dough. OK, that one needs more testing. We can't go ahead on legalization there because, as you know, we fight terrorism by fighting drugs, Larry. You heard that in the State of the Union speech and in the commercials on the Super Bowl.

KING: You didn't buy that, huh?

MAHER: I think that is such a cynical effort to piggyback their former agenda onto the fears of 9/11. That to me is really a low blow. Yes, because first of all, it is not all drugs. I don't think the people who are smoking a joint to relieve their bone cancer pain are really the people we want to be targeting on the war on terror. It is mostly heroin. But if the theory is that terrorists get some of their money from drugs, well, let's go to where they get their real money from, oil. They get a lot more money from oil and diamonds than they do from drugs.

KING: A comic last night, it may have been Drew Carey at the Love Rocks Concert, said, if that's the case, then why don't you legalize it? And we won't go to Paris anymore.

MAHER: Oh, God. We could probably solve a lot of problems if we had that kind of money just from Woody Harrelson's house.

KING: OK. Before we get back to the calls, every time people think they read you a certain way, they find there's another side to Bill Maher. You are against the anti-smoking campaign.

MAHER: Oh, horribly, yes. I think it is just -- I thought among the things that would go away after 9/11 would be this silly obsession with smoking.

KING: Silly obsession with a killer?

MAHER: A killer. Yes, well, there's lots of killers out there, Larry. It is someone's choice to put that killer in their mouth. KING: That's your position?

MAHER: That's a fact. Is there anyone in America who does not know that smoking is bad for you? Anyone?

KING: No.

MAHER: OK. They even awarded someone money last year -- I think it was last year maybe, or a couple of years ago, who started smoking after they put the warning on the pack. Before it had only been before. I could understand that. But after the warning was on the pack? Apparently, they didn't mention her by name.

So, you know, I saw these Super Bowl ads. I thought it was incredibly ironic that there was two Super Bowl ads.

KING: The American...

MAHER: Well, whatever it is. You know, there's people on a beach and they look up and there's a sky-writing plane that says something about how bad smoking is. The fact that they chose the beach, that they are so blind to the fact that the beach itself is...

KING: Cancer.

MAHER: Cancer. They're in the rays of the sun while they're gorging themselves on nitrate-laden hot dogs, OK. I think it's, you know, breathing next to an SUV or in Houston is probably...

KING: Do you agree that if cigarettes had never been heard of and were proposed to be legalized, they wouldn't have a prayer?

MAHER: Right. Well, cigarettes kill how many people?

KING: They think 400,000.

MAHER: 400,000. What about alcohol? That kills about 150,000, 200,000.

KING: Easy.

MAHER: Those are legal. But marijuana has so far killed none that I've ever known. So I keep saying if we want to legalize marijuana, we have got to start having people drop dead from it.

(LAUGHTER)

I also think it is interesting on the Super Bowl, the beer ads. Now, have you noticed that in beer ads, in the last couple of years, they're all the same. The guy chooses beer over a hot girl. Have you noticed that? It used to be that the guy drank the beer and then he'd get the hot girl. You went into the suburb, you ordered the right beer, that got you the supermodel.

KING: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)

MAHER: Right, that was stupid. But at least the idea behind that was if I use this product, it will get me sex. Sex is something natural which you have an urge for. When someone prefers the beer over the woman, that is the definition of addiction, Larry. When you choose the drug over the girl -- so they're advertising addiction. In the same breath they're saying, but don't do it too much.

If I can't do it legally, I will do it illegally. Here, in Russia, or preferably in Amsterdam where all the hassle has been eliminated.

The prohibitionists have no clout in Amsterdam. They sure are gleeful about what they have done to us in the US.

I've just returned from a couple of weeks which saw me working with a humanitarian organization in Tajikistan and Northern Afghanistan. In Tajikistan, the thing that surprised me the most is how much the majority of the people I personally spoke to miss the USSR. The statues of Lenin are actually still standing. Suprised me.

I have no objections whatsoever to anyone cataloging any horror or calamity that that person has the courage and wherewithal to accomplish. The better the corroboration of evidence the better. Just don't ask me to rate one horror against another.

Let's look at how Noam describes anarchism and we'll see how Klaus Kinski ended up ranting in his chains on the train to Siberia in the film version of Dr. Zhivago.

The anarchists in Russia correctly identified the Tsarist government as being coercive, authoritarian, and hierarchic and correctly determined that its legitimacy was due for a challenge.

However, undermining that system could in no way be seen as having led to any expansion in the scope of freedom.

Especially not for the anarchists themselves who ended up in mass graves or on their way to labor camps.

While the anarchists were helping the Bolsheviks undermine the illegitimate Tsarist system, the Bolsheviks were learning how to create a coercive, authoritarian, and hierarchic system that was too ironclad coercive, authoritarian, and hierarchic to be successfully undermined by any more anarchists in the future.

And they succeeded. Stalin and Lenin and all the top Bolsheviks had successfully escaped from the Russian labor camp system, and they improved security and built up the system so that it could actually hold the people they sent there. And pretty soon, having been a Russian anarchist before the Revolution was something that could get someone sent there.

And I think that's just an inherent danger in a philosophy that won't by definition commit to any positive goals, just to interrupting what are seen as negative existing structures.

It's just asking to end up in the Klaus Kinski seat on the train to Siberia.

If you're too effective at undermining existing structures, then the system is not going to come to a stable position until something develops that can't be easily undermined, and then everyone is in trouble.

Working to undermine existing coercive structures is not necessarily going to expand the scope of freedom.

And that's what happened in Russia.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, if squeezing comedy from current events was a crime, he'd be on America's most wanted every week. Bill Maher, politically incorrect, proud of it, next, with your calls on LARRY KING LIVE.

I'm looking for the transcript of Larry King with Bill Maher as guest. I tuned in late but heard him tell Larry King...

Bill: Who doesn't know smoking cigarettes is dangerous? Taking 400,000 lives a year, alcohol taking 150,000 lives a year and do you know how many have died from marijuana Larry? Zero. I've always said if you want to legalize it you have to find some that kills lots of people first.

Todays alcohol ads have a man choosing between a beer and a beautiful woman. Now 20 years ago the guy would have drank the beer and went after the woman. Today he chooses the beer over the woman. Is that any clearer definition of a substance addiction they're promoting? King was laughing his ass off...

The entire Joe McCarthy GOPer commie paranoia and propaganda was to disrupt labor and keep wages low with workers not rocking the boat. Same today with the same carrot biters following blindly and ranting and spastically jerking Iraqi crude plastic flags and now with Bushit irresponsibility, do it while they kick the shit out of some innocent hippie or tye dye wearer out of plastic sick putrid phoney Nationalism misnomered patriotism by the same bloody supporters of Hitler and Mussolini. No bystanders. You either promote legalization or you are a Nazi. naive or intentional, but a god damn sadistic babykilling money slut nazi just the same! Call it despots, tyrannist, dictators, KGB, CIA or monarchy... its all against free will and liberty.
Excuse my French.
Peace, Love and Liberty
DdC

Noam Chomsky
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fendingcannabisprohibitionantiwodwarriors.showMessage?topicID=38.topic Noam Chomsky on Renee Boje
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High times Interview With Noam Chomsky

Chomsky interview on 9/11 attacks
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Behind the Rhetoric
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Assaulting Solidarity -- Privatizing Education
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Force and Opinion
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January 1995
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CHOMSKY CALLS DERSHOWITZ A LIAR AND A CLOWN
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fendingcannabisprohibitionmessageboards.showMessage?topicID=70.topic

Millennial Visions and Selective Vision Part One
By Noam Chomsky
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fendingcannabisprohibitionmessageboards.showMessage?topicID=71.topic

Noam Chomsky Archives
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm

Talkin John Birch Paranoid Blues
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fendingcannabisprohibitionfrm13.showMessage?topicID=29.topic NOW THAT THE BUFFALO'S GONE
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fendingcannabisprohibitionfrm13.showMessage?topicID=28.topic MY COUNTRY 'TIS OF THY PEOPLE YOU'RE DYING
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fendingcannabisprohibitionfrm13.showMessage?topicID=26.topic

Religion, journalism, history, poetry, toilet paper, music, theater, light bulbs, Beatles, jeans, free market economics... Not to mention cannabis.

Only alcohol and tobacco escaped the jaws of Communist prohibition. Hmmm imagine that.

And just last year Bush was photo-opped in a cowboy hat shaking hands with a former Soviet KGB spy in Texas -- sealing an agreement to be allies in the War on Drugs.

It's great that Noam Chomsky is targeting the Drug War now, that is going to help surround the Democrats with encouragement from another side.

But I do get genuinely concerned when I see what he has been claiming about Cold War history. I really don't think he has done justice there. And it's so ironic, because he considers himself an anarchist, and what happened to the Russian anarchy movement after the Communists won?

That's where Klaus Kinski on the train in Dr. Zhivago comes in. He's a Russian anarchist, on his way to forced labor in a labor camp, being sent there by the Communists after they used him to help win their so-called revolution.

I just wish I could ask Noam Chomsky personally how he feels about that particular scene. If there was one question I could ask him, it would be that.

Oh I ALWAYS get this repsonse from Chomsky fans when I point out how the Communists annihilated the Russian left wing.

Look, if you are going to allege that the Communists were somehow beneficial because the country went into such a decline after they fell from power, then I am going to counter by asking you where the hell IS the Russian left wing today?

The people who should have been laying down the intellectual and political traditions of Russian leftist political thought are now a collection of bones in mass graves in the Moscow woods, with neat little bullet holes in the same place in the backs of their skulls behind where their ears used to be.

Those mass graves can be counted, they should be counted and they have been counted, and I don't think you or Noam Chomsky or Noam Chomsky's other fans should hold yourselves to be morally above counting them too.

There was a lot of political thinking buried in those graves. Those people buried in those mass graves should have been the intellectual ancestors of today's Russian anarchists and Socialists.

Not just a user.

Sound familiar?

Here's something else that will also sound familiar. Most Soviet citizens had supporting rationalizations for people like this typist being arrested and imprisoned. The Gulag Archipelago is a genuinely depressing and upsetting book. Reading that every day probably COULD cause depression in sensitive individuals.

So people rationalized it that way -- who needs to read such depressing books anyway? Who needs to have their mind altered from the path of Socialism by some work of a mentally ill depressive incapable of living a normal clean productive Soviet life?

And that poor typist was considered a manufacturer of this dangerous drug.

And punished accordingly.

And you had to be serious about hiding it from certain neighbors because people would definitely narc each other out over this stuff.

There was a very tragic story of a woman who typed out a whole complete copy of Gulag Archipelago, and gave it to a friend to transport somewhere, and he got drunk and left it on the taxi.

And the KGB got it, the taxi driver found it and turned it in, and the KGB found the guy and got him to turn over on the typist, and she ended up in a labor camp and he committed suicide.

See how similar Soviet culture was to today's American marijuana prohibition culture?

Thanks to the Communists criminalizing all private economic activity into the black market, Russian business had a deep basis in criminal funding, tradition and technique, including highly sophisticated techniques of tax evasion and money laundering.

The Soviet Union gave capitalist-minded people in Russia a brutal 75 year lesson in how to hide income and evade taxes and live outside the law.

And that's part of the reason why their economy is still in such trouble now. Because it takes an armed contingent of Black Berets to collect taxes from some businesses in Russia.

In America, freedom means intellectual freedom, and the people in the Soviet Union who were arrested and imprisoned because of their efforts to create and maintain some semblance of intellectual freedom were considered dissidents and their sad tales of victimization were detailed for Americans in the pages of the New York Times.

But there were plenty of men and women in Soviet labor camps and prisons for what were considered under Soviet law to be economic crimes. What they did was operate outside of the eternally failing Soviet production and distribution system to provide the goods and services that the system couldn't manage to provide on its own because the Soviet economic system basically did not in fact work.

Need toilet paper deperately but the official state store can't get any because the command economy failed to issue the right command on time?

Go to the guy around the corner selling it out of the back of his truck.

Neext week there could be a new guy, because the old guy was busted and sent to prison.

But there will always be toilet paper being sold out of the back of some guy's truck, as long as the state store can't get any because the command economy cannot ever issue the right commands.

In the late 1980s, when Gorbachev started giving amnesty for the politcal prisoners, he freed everyone who had been seeking intellectual freedom.

The guys who sold toilet paper from the backs of their trucks were left to rot in the camps, which were pretty rotten as the Communist system fell further and further into budgetary crisis.

In August 1991 when the whole Communist system collapsed in just a few days in a massive fit of terminal disgust on the part of the population, the only people in the country who really understood economics that was NOT command economics were the guys who had been selling toilet paper from the backs of their trucks.

Except by that time, these guys had been hardened and formed and educated and cultured and organized into families in the Soviet labor camp system.

And when the Communists left power, they took over, and the former Communist junior level managers who tried to compete with them in business were mercilessly crushed like ants beneath their boots.

The Communists criminalized capitalism to the extent that by the time Communism fell, the people who knew how to use capitalism the best were prison-hardened criminals.

Why Americans refuse to learn from this history -- I don't know. Maybe the polarizing effect of the Red Scares in the fifties and sixties crippled the ability of the American educational system to sustain any objective examination of the real Communist system.

Between the defensive and apologetic leftists and the paranoid and reactionary right wingers, when did any American school kid ever have a chance to learn how that system really differed from ours?

The story was told to me by a man who was 9 years old at that time. He was living on his grandparents farm.

His grandmother begged the Russian colonel not to take her cow, but could have the calf.

The Russian colonel took both the calf and the cow. He said to the grandmother, "I don't give a s#_t."

"All is fair in love and war"

Communists hate socialists, no reason to start a war when you can systematically exterminate a population with tyrannical, totalitarian 'law'.

A lot of heads rolled during the French Revolution. Studies were done and documentation exists of how long a person remained conscious after their head was severed from their body.

Believe it or not, I have read that NASA has those studies.

Man's inhumanity to man has no bounds.

During the crusades, Christian crusaders decimated a Moslem city's population from 70,000 to 3,000 in about 3 days.

Oh really? Ahhhh BECAUSE illicit drugs are NOT available pure & cheap we have thousands poisoned, shot & brain damaged for life -- daily. & the US erodes our personal freedoms daily (fmly in the name the WoD-- now "terrorism" which is, mmm, financed by drugs, too.)

Just think if our US corpo-gov't woke up one day & say created the the ATFN (alcohol tobacco firearms & narcotics)

You could wipe out 40 - 60% of ALL GLOBAL CRIME with the stroke of a pen. Tax & regulate a product one knows WILL ALWAYS EXSIST.

A Libertarian as president in 2008, I believe it can happen. Hey if H. Ross Perot can get 19% of the popular vote in '92 & Jesse Ventutra can get elected Gov. -- a well ran Liberatarian CAN get elected in 2008 as president.

You laugh>? Hey they laughed at Ventura until they let him in the debates & people heard his message & he won. Gee, where was HARRY BROWNE in the 2000 Presidental debate?

He wasn't allowed to participate because the Debate Commission was all Republicrats.

God didn't Bless the U.S.A. that day, oh well.

I am a Libertarian since '99 but I don't think I am an ultrarightist but rather a pragmatic anarchist, with a capitalistic slant.

Make all illicit drugs safe & legal too all those 21 & over who sign consent forms stating dangers & risks & mandatory prisons terms for those supplying to minors or operating/driving under the influence.

How long everyone before we seriously stop proping up all these corruopt foreign gov't who play the US for fools BECAUSE PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS USE DRUGS REGARDLESS OF THEIR STATUS UNDER THE LAW!

Does the US really believe as long as we have chocolate & poppy seeds we WON'T have cocaine & heroin???

Please, I love the USA but its turning into a police state each day, more & more. Do you disagree? esp after 9/11?

A gov't that trusted its citizens would legalize drugs today, for a safer society. All the way around.

What they can trust me with a loaded .45 pistol, a camel cig, & a bottle of jack daniels but not a hemp plant????????

Hey US Gov't corpo-politicians: Get real & wake.

When it comes to this subject, there is little Good, more Bad, and Everything Ugly.

NOTHING I say, should be taken to support terror, uprooting populations, forced migrations for ethnic cleansing or ethnic mixing (Russians forced to move to the ***stans for instance), or any of the other horrors of this world. Certainly there were many in the USSR.

More than all those bad guys combined? I refuse to measure one horror against another. One does not condone, excuse, justify or give excuse for another.

(I do agree that we should end this WoSD.)

Chomsky doesn't get this, or he does and for some reason forgives it.

Lenin meant every single word of that statement, not one word was hyperbole, and Stalin and then the later USSR government carried it out to the best of their abilities.

The Communists killed more Socialists than Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, and Kissinger combined.

It's the point about Soviet history that escapes Americans completely.

Without this fact nobody can hope to understand the bizarre political spectrum and strange political bedfellows in Russian politics today.

It's not funny at all to use this phrase "Stalinist excess".

And what happened to the dissidents in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties was not funny either.

The Soviet Union was a geniuinely evil power, there is and was no excuse to the so-called "excess", and they were not in any sense ever anyone's victims. Imre Nagy and Alexander Dubcek were victims. Not their oppressors.

And exactly who do you think was killed off by the Communists?

THE ENTIRE RUSSIAN LEFT WING

It is only the ignorance of leftist history promoted by the American school system that makes American leftists so "understanding" about the Soviet Union.

The reason WHY so muych depravity followed the collapse of Communism is because the Communists systematically eliminated any competing ways of thinking ON THE LEFT.

That's why what was left over when the smoke cleared was a bunch of right wing nationalist organizations ---- making sweet deals with the Communists in the Duma.

And Chomsky really refuses to understand that lesson, as do all anarchists, who have no freaking idea why there was a Klaus Kinski character on the train to begin with.

One thing that I heard him say (on Worldlink tv) while he was being roundly criticized by a heckler is: "Stalin was in favor of freedom of expression as long as it coincided with his views."

I suppose if you did not, it was a long ride on the train to Siberia.

Noam Chomsky is an intelligent man. Disconcerting is his middle name. To be able to read his writings, understand his wisdom is better than having had to submit to the totalitarian caprices of Josef Stalin.

Chomsky will undertstand and listen, Stalin would have had me eating gruel from a makeshift bowl that I could make from the wool coat I was wearing.

If he is imploring the US to decriminalize marijuana, I would listen. The politicians should do so. When you listen, you can't be talking. It is time for politicians to start listening and stop talking. They need to stop being babies and grow up.

He is a man with the courage to stand for his convictions.

And E_J, his economic stances also have some merit...I have personally seen some of the depravation that the break-up of the Former Soviet Union has caused. The issue is far more involved than Good vs. Evil. This does not excuse any Stalinist excess, anymore than I condone the growing US gulag.

If there was one question I would ask him personally, it would be, "What do you think of the scene in Dr. Zhivago where Klaus Kinski rattles his chains and says, "I'm the only free man on this train!"?"