Full transcript: Noam Chomsky on London Real
2:27 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, philosopher, political activist and professor emeritus at MIT. You are a leading figure in analytic philosophy, cognitive science and are widely regarded as the father of modern linguistics. Your academic career has spanned eight decades and you are laureate professor at the University of Arizona. You’ve written more than 100 books on topics such as Linguistics War.
2:51 Politics and mass media and hold the status as the most quoted living author as outspoken as ever. You continue to rally against the mainstream media and the culture war in America while campaigning for our civil liberties, including freedom of speech. Noam Chomsky Welcome to London. Real pleased to be with you. Great to have you here. Before we get started, I just want to announce that we are streaming now on our brand new Digital Freedom platform, which is a censorship<Unk>Free independent broadcasting system. That is of the people, by the people, for the people. And it’s available exclusively on our website at FreedomPlatform TV.
3:23 Professor Chomsky I pledge you and everyone watching us that none of this conversation will be edited, censored, removed or banned. And that anyone in the world can watch the free version of this episode at Freedom platform DOT TV forward Slash Chomsky. Thanks to the generous donations of over 33 000 people around the world that I affectionately call the London Real Army. For anybody wanting to become a founding member of the Digital Freedom Platform, they can visit FreedomPlatform. TV forward Slash give to donate and fight with us on the front lines to protect our human rights.
3:50 Here at London, Real, we’ve been a platform for free speech since 2011. And Gnome, I’m excited to talk to you here today. I wanted to kick off with the topic of freedom of speech, you know, for nine years, we broadcasted here with no problems. Until April 6th, when one of the biggest live streams in the world was shut down and then banned and deleted on YouTube. And now I’ve been introduced to this concept of censorship, which I always thought happened to the other guy, Um, I’m curious. How do you see freedom of speech in the digital era?
4:24 Well, digital speech has always been speech and writing have always been tightly controlled. Nobody ever paid any attention to it because the targets were overwhelmingly on the left and so therefore was considered perfectly normal and okay. And now the UH, targets are ranging. Widely right Wing Center is, of course, becoming an issue, but it should be, Uh, it should be. We should carefully protect freedom of speech. It’s the fundamental right that we should make sure to give very high priority to no matter whose ox is being gored.
5:07 And when you look at it in the digital era, I mean, so much of our lives are lived online now and digitally. And yet it’s not something I can, I can voice. Now it has to go through a platform like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook. That’s now controlled by, you know, a sometimes a trillion dollar company in Silicon Valley, sometimes a monopoly. How does that change? The whole dynamic of of freedom of speech Facebook is has enormous power to control speech, but and there’s a question how they should be treated. My feeling is that they should be regarded very much like any other media organization, so they shouldn’t be under any government control. But they should be subject to whatever conditions the regular media are.
6:00 So, for example, I personally I don’t believe in libel suits. But if there are libel laws, they ought to be subjected to the same laws that The Times or The Guardian. Or I don’t think British libel laws, I think, are outrageous, but even more mild ones I think one should be very cautious about. However, to free them from that seems to give them a kind of an unfair position relative to the regular media. And I know you once said that even though the the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, it wasn’t until really the the civil rights movements where those were, those were really put to the test. Because I think you said before, you actually have to fight for that and constantly fight for that.
6:50 Freedom, um? Because it’s not just a given, a First Amendment doesn’t protect freedom of speech, the First Amendment, if you read it, protects, uh, prior restraint, but you can be punished for the speech under the First Amendment, First Amendment doesn’t say anything about that. Actually, it wasn’t until the 20th century that the issue started reaching the High Court, the Supreme Court. If you look at the early statements mildly supporting freedom of speech, they were actually dissents.
7:30 The sense by Holmes and Brandeis and very weak ones. Really. Wasn’t until basically the civil rights movement that a strong stand was taken by the courts in favor of freedom of speech. So in Times v. Sullivan 1964, The Supreme Court for the first time struck down the principle of sovereignty, sovereignty, immunity, sovereign immunity.
8:01 Which Britain still has. Incidentally, which means you can’t attack the sovereign by words, Uh, that was a case. And then, a little bit later, in Brandenburg, the Ohio in 1969, the Supreme Court hit the highest standard. That’s, I think, ever been reached in freedom of in protecting freedom of speech. This, incidentally, was a Ku Klux Klan case.
8:28 Uh, it’s a hated organization. But it said they had the right to speech, and the criterion that was established was basically that. Speech should be free up to participation in imminent criminal acts. Which means that if you and I go into a store and I have a gun and you plan to rob it. And you say, Shoot, that’s not permitted speech, that’s basically the idea.
9:01 And of course, it’s very flexible, you know, none of these principles are precise. We’ll have to be interpreted, but the general idea is that free speech should be generally quite free short of Participation Criminal Act now that does raise questions. So, for example, suppose that some Neo<Unk>nazi organization decides to put up a huge billboard in Times Square in New York, overlooking Times Square. Which says to the crematoria, Should that be permitted? I wouldn’t object myself if that were taken down, though I think you could give an argument that they should do it.
9:46 My own feeling is the way to deal with hateful speech. It’s not to silence it, but to expose it and it can be done. One of the striking examples in the United States, the United States, is probably beyond any other country that I know in protection of freedom of speech. There was a case must have been 20 years ago or so when a neo<Unk>nazi group who wanted to have a parade through a town in Illinois, Skokie, Illinois, which is full of Holocaust survivors and so on. They want to have an anti<unk>semitic demonstration right down the main street, and it was permitted.
10:35 The ACLU, the Civil Liberties Union, supported it. The town accepted. It turned out very well. They organized a counter<unk>demonstration to try to expose them. The group was frightened off, never even showed up.
10:56 And you think that’s a better way to allow it to happen out in the open, as opposed to, say, block it. Like, like in Europe, you know, Holocaust deniers. It’s illegal, but you think that that sometimes can. It’s not the best tactical move because. It gives them maybe more exposure, as opposed to just letting it out there in the open, but I think sometimes the exposure’s good.
11:17 So take a case that just happened and where the I’m sure you read. Senator Tom Cotton had an op<unk>ed in The New York Times which aroused the Fuhrer, and they finally took it off. And in fact, the editor from the Web page, the editor, resigned, and so on. Personally, I think it was very good to publish it. It’s very good to know that people in high places have the kinds of beliefs that he does that these are people who are really fundamentally criminals, basic criminals.
11:53 We should know that I think it was important when the major newspapers. New York Times Washington Post published, UH, Op<Unk>eds by UH, John Bolton, former national security adviser in which he called for bombing Iran right now. So let’s be the worst criminal state since the Nazis because we don’t like them. I think it’s important to know that the National Security Advisor is a neo<unk>nazi. I don’t want that to be secret.
12:26 Did when the when the Internet came about, were you expecting that because we could bypass the mainstream media that would, there would be, finally, the democratization of of free speech? I mean, were you expecting that? Because when I look at it now, it seems like in some ways the opposite has happened. The digital media have a strange impact. Technically, they should be increasing freedom and speech.
12:52 But in fact, what’s happening, I think, is that people are direct being directed into bubbles, where they never hear anything except their own views. REPORT. And so it’s kind of technically freedom of. Speech, but effectively it’s probably reducing it, yeah, and it’s strange changes by law that has to be changed by practice understanding change of consciousness. Yeah, you’re right, because we end up creating these echo chambers, that feedback, what we want to hear, we banish the views we don’t want to hear.
13:29 And then even these days, it seems like it becomes so populist where there’s this canceled culture. When anyone says something unpopular, they just get relegated off the platform. So in some ways, freedom of speech has almost been lost by democratizing it. We have to remember that cancel culture and D platforming are very old. I could give you many examples from my own personal experience, but it was always against the left, so therefore it wasn’t considered a problem you didn’t even notice it.
14:03 I mean, there are cases that are so extreme, they’re almost hard to be learned. It could be a real case. My friend Ed Hermann for Late Ed Herman and I published many books together one of them is on the media Manufacturing Consent. The first book we published together was in 1971, a book called Counter<Unk>revolutionary Violence. It was published in a by Small publisher.
14:33 Flourishing Small Publisher was owned by a major conglomerate published 20 000 copies ready to distribute them. An executive in the conglomerate saw the ads for the book. Didn’t like it. Asked to be see a copy, had a tantrum ordered the publisher to stop the distribution. They there was some negotiations up and back, they basically refused.
15:00 So he put the whole publisher out of business, destroyed all their stock, all of it entire stock. To prevent the distribution of one book he didn’t like. Did anybody think that was a violation of freedom of speech? No. Not the ACLU, not civil libertarians, because it was private corporate censorship, which goes on all the time, of course.
15:24 But that’s and it was targeted against the left, so therefore it was quite all right. I could give you, uh, just my own personal experience case. After case of what’s now called the platforming, uh, council culture breaking up, meetings by violence on university campuses have to have police protection. If you’re talking about something critical, never considered a problem, it’s now considered a problem because somebody else’s ox is being guarded. So so it’s right, it shouldn’t exist, but it’s very hypocritical. Okay, talk to me about self<unk>censorship. Uh, are we seeing more of that these days?
16:06 With, again, the kind of the populist online culture, or where we’re all self<unk>censoring more than we even know we are. Um, have you seen that change, or is that also something that’s been around for a very long time? Well, there’s a kind of it’s kind of a mixed story, so what’s this? There’s a difference between self<unk>censorship, just out of fear and self<unk>censorship out of sensitivity. So if I see, uh, suppose I see a You know, some a black man outside and I call him, Boy, I wouldn’t do that okay. But that’s not self<unk>censorship that’s being a decent, honest, sane human being.
16:54 If somebody sees me and says, Hey, Kite, come over here, I don’t think they should say that, okay, they’re not self<unk>censoring, uh, they’re again just behaving with minimal decency. But this has changed, uh, until not too long ago in the United States. So let’s go back to the 1930s. When I was a kid, I remember a article lead article in the Major. Business Journal Forbes magazine lead article on the front page Big headline The Whops are unwhopping themselves.
17:34 There’s an article saying the trains are running on time in Mussolini, in Italy. The Whops are unwhopping themselves. Okay, people wouldn’t do that now. I hope not because there’s a law against it, but because consciousness has changed the same with, uh, jokes about, Uh, it was normal for people to make what they thought were funny jokes about, Uh, you know, blacks. Yeah, okay, is that self<unk>censorship?
18:07 I mean, there are cases where it can go too far. But sensitivity to the feelings of others and treating people with dignity and respect is not self<unk>censorship. Okay, you’ve talked about freedom of thought before, which I I think is a fundamental human right. People, most people would agree, exists, and but it’s linked to freedom of speech. I believe you’ve spoken about this in the past and your work is in linguistics. I mean, how important is the speech component to the thought component to just being a a human being?
18:45 Well, there were attempts to, uh, to block freedom of thought that’s what the inquisition was about now. People were tortured to try to prevent their thoughts, they were made to take oaths under severe threat, not to think certain things. And in fact, George Orwell had a some comments about this, which are interesting and animal form, which everybody’s read, of course, but not that many people have read the introduction to Animal Farm. One reason is it wasn’t published it was found in his unpublished papers 30 years later. I think it was published.
19:31 By the If I’m Not Mistaken by The Times Literary Supplement about 30 years after it appeared. It’s not one of his great essays, but it’s interesting he’s, Uh, basically, the theme is, uh, this book is a satire on the Totalitarian enemy. But people in Free England shouldn’t feel too self<unk>righteous about it, because in England, what he called literary censorship control is common, he says. In England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he gives some examples not very penetrating, but then a couple of sentences about how it works, says. Part of the reason is that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in seeing that some ideas are suppressed. Like the example I gave about the publisher being destroyed.
20:33 Uh, and that goes. He wasn’t talking about that, he was just talking about the mainstream media. And then he said, The other thing is basically just being brought into the culture. So you go to Oxford and Cambridge, you learn how to behave like a gentleman. You know that you just have inculcated into you.
20:56 The idea that there are certain things you just wouldn’t do to say. And I think we can add, wouldn’t do to think part of acculturation. What we call education called it indoctrination. If you like is that there’s some thoughts you just can’t think they wouldn’t come to your mind because they’re so pressed out of the culture. I’ll give you an example from the lead headline in the newspaper this morning.
21:28 Good place to start, always So the big headline in the New York. Times is about, uh, allegations that the Russians paid a Taliban bounty to kill Americans. Big couple of main main stories about great outrage. There’s something it wouldn’t do to say, or probably to think, Let’s go back to the 1980s. The United States was publicly not only announcing, but bragging about the fact that it was supporting radical Islamist with the purpose of killing Russians.
22:17 Okay, that was the official statement of the CIA station chief in Islamabad who was running the operation. Top officials Brzezinski and others were saying, We’re giving them their Vietnam, we can kill a lot of them by arming radical Islamists to kill them. It wouldn’t occur to anybody to think of that. When we say maybe the Russians that we don’t have evidence, maybe they’re paying somebody to kill Americans. That’s the kind of thing you don’t think if you’re well educated.
22:56 Have you been watching what Elon Musk has been doing? He’s got a company called Neural Link, where they want to plug in some electrodes into your brain and then tap right into your thoughts. And I’m wondering, if you look at this technology, would you ever think that language is archaic technology? And would you ever think that? Maybe language is what separates us from connecting with what we all are, which is humans. Having a human experience. Is that ever something you’ve contemplated because I know your work has been in linguistics?
23:28 This is complete science fiction and forget about it, not within. I mean, almost nothing is understood about how the brain processes language you can. There are things that can be. Done, and they’re getting a huge amount of publicity, but they’re essentially meaningless. It’s PR, so, for example, there’s a lot of publicity about the fact that what’s called deep learning. You know the use of super computers to work on huge amounts of data very quickly, and they can pretty well do things like, say, making a good guess if you’re writing something, predicting what the next word might be.
24:09 If you have. There’s some programs, very annoying programs that you have on your computer, which tells you guesses what the next word is going to be. If you’d write something and that’s considered a profound discovery, you know, we’ve invented discovered creativity. It’s actually zero significance, totally insignificant, I mean you, if you tried this in, say, you looked at scientific experiments if you looked at billions of scientists, say, chemistry experiments. And you take a the sequence of events that take place, you could predict pretty well what the next thing is going to be. You mix these two chemicals, it’s going to turn blue, is that chemistry? I mean, it’s nothing.
25:02 This is public relations for I.B.M. but you see, or I mean, there are articles in serious journals. New York, Great Discovery, Total Zero. I mean, almost nothing is understood about how the brain computes. In fact, we don’t. Even there’s good evidence that what people are looking at isn’t even the right thing.
25:28 Now. The models that are developed, say at Silicon Valley and elsewhere, are based on neural nets and, of course, neural nets are there and they do something, but there’s pretty good evidence that they’re not what’s involved in neural computation. This is, at the moment, critical voices among scientists. But I. Think they’re probably right, there’s a lot of reasons to believe that they may be just looking at the wrong place.
25:55 I think one of the big points that Elon says is that language is kind of a low bandwidth technology of communicating between two humans. Do you ever look at it that way? Like sometimes I feel like if I could plug into your brain or you could plug into someone else’s brain. We might be able to come to a consensus, yet when we use these words back and forth, sometimes we seem to go away from consensus. Do you ever think about that?
26:21 Well, I’m not addicted to science fiction novels, but if I was reading them, I might be addicted to it. That’s actually it’s just nothing to do with anything that’s understood. I mean, the things you can do, you can probably, I mean, DarpA the, uh, defense. The research branch of the Pentagon is working on things like seeing if they can pick up electrical signals from neural activity, which can be used to direct actions like, in theory, could a an airplane pilot, uh, think something and have an instrument move?
27:05 That’s not inconceivable. I mean, it’s within the range of the limits of understanding, but trying to figure out what the pilot is thinking about, we haven’t a clue, right, you know what, we were banned, actually on YouTube. It was a two and a half hour, nuanced conversation between two individuals where we didn’t promote violence, overthrow the government destruction of property. And yet, on the other end, I think YouTube said, Um, the gentleman was promoting quote unquote hate speech. Or they picked a few words that he said and said, This was against our community policy, you know, with with the last 10 years of this.
27:50 Podcasting, technology and long form video, we’ve seen kind of what a nuanced conversation looks like. Um, how much does that have to do with the work that you spent many years doing, and what does that mean? Nuance Does that mean linguistics allowed to exist in a long form to where you can try to transmit more complex ideas? Linguistics tells you nothing about any of this. It’s like asking a molecular biologist whether he can tell you how to raise your children.
28:26 I mean, it’s a biological problem, but the guy working in molecular biology on protein folding isn’t going to tell you anything about. I mean, there’s a lot of fakery going on about what you know Sciences could tell you about ordinary life. You got to be very cautious about it. I mean, they’re important, very important work, like I think the work we’re doing, what molecular biologists are doing extremely important. But if you think it’s going to directly get involved in your life, I think that’s serious.
29:05 And we have to pay attention to what is and is not understood. And even the rudiments of how organisms work is barely understood. So how does you know there was a lot when the DNA sequencing began? There was a lot of excitement about how, oh, we’re going to understand how organisms develop almost nothing. What you learn is that proteins are formed.
29:37 They fold in some fashion. Something else happens, then a big production system takes place and very quickly gets totally out of hand. These are hard problems, same in the the brain. Sciences are particularly hard to understand for one reason, because there are ethical barriers to doing the kinds of experiments you think of. So we don’t.
30:04 Fortunately, if no mangle is around, we don’t do things like sticking electrodes into people’s, uh, the speech areas of the brain to try to figure out what particular cells are doing. Not long ago, experiments like this were done with animals. Not now. Noam, Are you hopeful on the future, or do you think that we’ve forgot some of the things that you’re mentioning? That happened in the 40s, or we forgot times where a lot of our basic human rights were not there. Do you do you think we’re destined to repeat this, or are you hopeful for the future? I think pretty generally speaking, there’s regression, but over time the range of rights and recognition of rights has been extended.
30:54 So, for example, the Forbes magazine, Uh, cover story that I mentioned couldn’t appear today. There’s greater sensitivity to the needs and rights of broader groups, not only of people, but even a bit of animals. So plenty of animal experimentation that was done right where I live and work, uh, 40, 50 years ago would not be permitted today. Uh, virtually no experiments on in invasive experiments with apes and monkeys is permitted now. So that, but um, similarly with people, the things you wouldn’t say about the women that people made jokes about 450 years ago. Okay, just don’t do it, uh, it’s a growth of sensitivity, uh, human decency, recognition of other people’s rights.
31:55 Now it can, at the extremes, go to the point where it goes too far. Okay, let’s be careful about that. But at the core at the base, there’s a very positive development of expansion, of recognition that people have. Rights they have their dignity, they have their self<unk>respect. We should honor that.
32:22 You famously said that we can’t have a capitalist democracy, and yet it feels like that’s what we’ve all been sold. Um, is that the root of many of the problems we have in the world or in the U S?
32:42 By now? In my opinion, just about every developed society for the last 100 years or so has been one or another form of state capitalism. That includes the ones that are called Socialist and communist. But and the state capitalist systems all have features that we don’t think about much or will again, but that are very dubious. Like, take the concept of having a job wage labor.
33:17 Deciding that for most of your waking hours, you will rent yourself to a tyrant, a tyrant who has total control over you way beyond anything that Stalin had. Uh, Stalin didn’t tell people. When you’re able to go to the bathroom or what clothes you’re allowed to wear. Or do you take this path or that path? If you’re going to pick up a package and put it somewhere?
33:47 If you’re a driver for a truck, didn’t tell you. When you’re allowed to have a coffee stop where you’re allowed to back up, that’s what it means to have a job. Total subordination for most of your waking hours to tyranny. Now, that hasn’t always been it. Now it’s accepted as normal, should it be when you go back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution? It was considered by working people to be an outrageous assault against fundamental human dignity.
34:21 Uh, taken for granted among working people. You read the Labor press very free back in the 19th century, full of denunciations of this. The U. S. Republican Party, under Abraham Lincoln, condemned it as a crime, said The only way we can accept wage labor. If it’s temporary until you become a free man again now we don’t think about it, should we? I think we should.
34:48 That’s the core of all of these societies, including the ones that call themselves Communists who still have the same thing. There’s a different form of learning. Well, those are questions we also should be raising. Lots of things that we don’t think about are very important to look into. Whether it’s the dedication to kill Russians and brag about it in the 1980s. When you’re reading a New York Times headline today.
35:17 Or whether it’s fundamental features of the society or whether it’s sensitivity to other people’s dignity and self<unk>respect. The kinds of things that aren’t thought about are often the most important ones, and in fact, a kind of a good rule of thumb, I think, is if there’s some issue on which there seems to be total consensus. Though it’s not a truism, you should be suspicious. There’s probably something serious going on that you ought to look into. You made an observation that, uh, surrounding the campus of M.I.T. which I think you’ve been there since around 55.
35:58 I didn’t get there till around 89, but you said you noticed how the companies around there changed. Over time, they went from kind of electronics companies in the 50s and 60s and then moved on into biotech. And and what that said about how our kind of society was being co<unk>opted? Can you explain that point you made? Because again, I think it’s about observing something that most people wouldn’t look at, but it shows you what’s happening with the government and industrial complex.
36:25 Because we’re taught in EcoN 101 that we live in a free<unk>market, Society of Entrepreneurial Capitalism and so on. If you look around you, it’s right in front of you, a very partial truth, so take this example. In the 1950s, when I got to M.I.T. 50s and 60s, the surrounding industries were mainly electronic firms. If you walk around the M.I.T. campus today, what you see is Pfizer, you know, genetic Novartis and so on. But why the change?
37:07 Well, the reason is that in the 50s and 60s, the cutting edge of the economy was electronics based. The government was pouring huge amounts of money into develop into doing the basic research and development that private corporations were learning from. So they could adapt it to working for, UH, market and profit. So I.B.M. could learn from the electronics lab where I was working.
37:40 How to move from punch card computers to electronic computers. And then they were able to develop after many years of marketable computers. Now, the cutting edge of the economy is often biology based. So the big pharmaceutical companies can learn from the research being done under government subsidy. Of course, at the main research universities so they can learn something that they can turn into drugs that they can market and so on.
38:17 No, of course, they get plenty of straight subsidies from the government itself, so right now there’s a lot of interest, of course, in vaccines. And, uh, drugs that might alleviate the effects of Covet. 19. A great deal of that research is done the basic core research, the hard creative part is done within fundamentally the public sector. Even if it’s in a private lab, it’s often with government funding, and there’s good reasons for that. A private enterprise doesn’t want to take risks on things that may not pay off.
38:56 It’s not their business, their business is to make profit. But the the creative, hard, risky work is very often done in the public sector. I mean, it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say. We have a system of public subsidy, private profit. And that goes way back, as you can trace it back to how England robbed technology from India. If you want to go back to the 18th century, I mean, this goes way back.
39:32 So, yes, there’s a story about free markets and how wonderful they are, and so on. So you start looking at what’s in front of you, like your computer, the screen that we’re both looking at. You see quite a different story. These are again things that people don’t think about. It’s in front of your eyes, but you don’t think about them because we’re if we’re well trained.
39:56 It’s not the kind of thing you think of them. Afraid. I got it off. I have another interview coming up, Okay, uh, can I guess what one last question for? You know, we’ve just seen seeing a massive division, you know, between the left and the right. And obviously protests on the street are America. But the last concern?
40:13 I asked you, What do you think is the solution to this problem, or how could we move forward in the next 10 years and not see such division? Such anger, such violence, first of all, there’s very little violence, but there is some. So to give you an example, I don’t know if it was reported in England about a week or two ago. There was a small village in Ohio. BETHEL, Ohio If you want to look it up, a village of about 2 000 people.
40:46 A couple of dozen young people decided to have a a completely non<unk>violent UH demonstration, where they expressed support for Black Lives Matter. The village was attacked by seven or eight hundred angry militia types with guns and baseball bats. To try to smash the place up and prevent this from happening, the town has about half a dozen police. We couldn’t do anything you do get that kind of violence, which is dangerous or militias are very significant. I want to take a look at some statistics when Donald Trump came in 2016. Uh, there’s careful close analyses of terrorism and terrorist related threats not very high in the United States, but it’s there 2016. About 20 of them were white supremacists today, almost almost 100 are white supremacists.
41:56 That’s four years of tweets and hints and stimulation of white supremacist violence from the White House. Okay, made a difference, yes, that’s there. But if you look at the demonstrations in the streets overwhelmingly non<unk>violent, there’s a fringe of looting and violence. We often don’t know who’s responsible, but overwhelmingly not. And the organizers Black organizers mostly try to damp it down because they know it’s just a gift to the right.
42:29 Yeah, than a woman. And they’re aiming at very crucial issues, not just police violence, which is serious, but not just that. And, of course, the police violence itself takes place in the context of a very violent society. Killings by guns are way beyond any comparable country. Police violence is not coming out of nowhere. It’s part of.
42:56 That, uh, but this beginning to look at the roots of the whole business. Remember, we’re looking at a society which has had 400 years of vicious repression virtually unremitting to the prison, leaving a very bitter legacy. There’s a lot to unravel, and interestingly, it’s arousing comparable concerns in other countries. So Britain has a hideous record of horrifying atrocities all over the world. Go back to Adam Smith, who is condemning the savage injustice of the Europeans, particularly the British in India, who were turning drought into famine by their vicious actions.
43:47 Well, that wasn’t taught in British schools, barely beginning to look at today. Same in France. So this awakening to looking at what our wealth is based on what our privilege is based on, who’s been suffering, that’s important. It’s important to know when you have a cell phone in your hand, as everybody does to ask why it’s cheap. Well, a couple of reasons.
44:17 One of them is virtual slave labor, run by Apple and its subsidiaries in China, of which China doesn’t make much profit. But Apple does, and Foxconn does. That’s one reason. Another reason is because the worst atrocities in the world are taking place. In eastern Congo, where the minerals are.
44:40 Millions of people are being killed, militias are slaughtering and so on. In the background, there are multinationals hovering to get cheap minerals from the militias that are slaughtering people that gets into your cell phone. It’s important to think about things like this. It’s all over. We don’t think about it much, but we should.
45:02 And what these demonstrations are showing is that that kind of consciousness is developing. It’s related, it’s not enough, what’s important is there? A solution solution is to keep raising is to keep what keep raising the consciousness and make it turn into policy. Right. Okay, uh, Professor Nanchansky, thank you so much for the time, thank you for your decades of work. Um, I appreciate your insights today. And, uh, I hope to do this in person sometime in the future.
45:36 Okay, very good to talk to you. Sorry, I have to leave all right, all the best. Thank you and, uh, thank you for watching here. We’ll see you next time on London Real Bye.
