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Der Spiegal: Professor Noam Chomsky, cathedrals of capitalism have collapsed, the conservative government is spending its final weeks in office with nationalization plans. How does that make you feel?

Noam Chomsky: The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable, its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

DS: What exactly did you anticipate?

NC: In the financial industry, as in other industries, there are risks that are left out of the calculation. If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion. Those are the external costs of our transaction. In the case of financial institutions, they are huge.

DS: But isn’t it the task of a bank to take risks?

NC: Yes, but if it is well managed, like Goldman Sachs, it will cover its own risks and absorb its own losses. But no financial institution can manage systemic risks.
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I was so eager to read the memoirs of this great Marxist historian that I could not wait to read it. Finished it on the plane last night. What a big disappointment. You can be a great historian and write a lousy memoirs. You don’t even learn much about who he is from reading it. You learn some about the times but I would rather read his The Age of Extremes (a history of the 20th century). Now that is a fine piece of work.

I think that the problems with this memoirs is this: to write a good memoirs 1) you need to think that you are somewhat interesting; 2) you need to be a good story teller; 3) you need to be comfortable talking about yourself. That does not apply here. (more…)

Speaking ill of my own nation always makes my feel like a heretic. Nationalism is now what religion used to be and any criticism of one’s own people is likely to be treated as treason by one’s compatriots – albeit as insanity by all others. To paraphrase the nationalist theorist Ernest Gellner: we now worship ourselves as we formerly worshiped God.

When Poland entered European Union more than three years ago, I was overly enthusiastic. Deep in my heart I was hoping that the demagoguery of the Eurosceptics would become at least partly true and Poland would lose some of its ultra-nationalist fervor. I hoped that the EU’s twelve stars will cast some light on my country and finally place us on a glorious path of enlightenment. I believed that our xenophobia, homophobia and Antisemitism would evaporate along with our “almost fanatical devotion to the Pope”, as Michael Palin of Monty Python once put it. (more…)

In a recent interview with IDG NOW magazine, Ian Pearson, British Telecom’s so-called “futurologist”, claimed that within 10 years scientists will be able to create computers that are only intelligent, but also conscious like us. The grim visions of terminator-like wars for energy and resources, combined with the heat of the Fijian night, kept me awake ’till the early morning hours. I only fell asleep, when it struck me that machines may as well help us solve the problems of global warming, hunger and poverty. (more…)

In Gaza it seems that everyone carries with them a well-honed set of opinions ready to blurt out for international journalists and other interested foreigners. Of course, I don’t doubt their substance but I must confess that, despite the horrors of military occupation and the terrible life in Gaza, many stories begin to sound the same. This may well be another reflection on the tragedy that is Gaza—so many heartwrenching anecdotes of human sacrifice are trivialized by the sheer quantity of victims.

During the first Intifada, the Palestinian cause caught the world’s sympathetic attention as images of children throwing rocks at tanks hit television screens worldwide. For a short time, the Palestinian resistance movement was entirely nonviolent. Citizens staged strikes, held public demonstrations at military checkpoints and for a while it seemed that the brutality of Israeli occupation was finally being exposed to the world. But it was not to be. Israel responded with Yitzhak Rabin’s notorious “break their bones” policy—and Israeli soldiers literally set about breaking the bones of children caught throwing stones.

The crushed hopes of the peace process and the endless Israeli expansion of settlements destroyed any possibility for a Palestinian state. On top of this, Israeli military measures grew ever more draconic. (more…)