Author Archives: Michael K. Smith

Noam Chomsky, lesser evilism, and democracy

Over the years Noam Chomsky has advanced a scathing indictment of U.S. elections, saying that they are really more “public relations extravaganzas” than ideological contests, that they therefore mean very little, especially at the national level; that he himself votes “less and less” at that level; that the system is not generating issues that resonate with the public; that there really aren’t any political parties, but only “candidate producing organizations” driven by marketing concerns; that the quadrennial farce that plays out at the presidential level is worth no more than “five minutes time,” and this, only to determine which candidate represents the greater threat, in order to vote against him; and that, in view of all this we should reserve our main political energy for vastly more meaningful work, such as popular education, union organizing, and cultural resistance. Continue reading

White supremacy before Trump: The U.S. conquest of Hawaii

August 21 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Hawaiian statehood. Many Americans know little more than package tours and “Pearl Harbor” about the fiftieth state, and few realize that when the U.S. naval base was attacked by the Japanese, it was not at the time U.S. territory. Even fewer have any idea how Hawaii came to have an important American naval base capable of triggering a world war. James Baldwin called our perpetual “ignorance” of vital historical matters American “innocence,” the inability to face or even recognize ugly facts about ourselves. In relation to Hawaii such innocence continues to render us oblivious of the imperial power grab that robbed the islands of their national independence 126 years ago. Continue reading