An
excerpt:
"When the world's two great
propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some
intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by
Lenin and
Trotsky and molded further by
Stalin and his successors has some relation to
socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of
contradiction.
It is clear enough why both major
propaganda systems insist upon this
fantasy. Since its origins, the
Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in
1917 to seize
State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the
socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any
socialist -- surely any serious
Marxist -- should have understood at once (many did), and a
lie of
mammoth proportions as
history has revealed since the earliest days of the
Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of
socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own
ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of
socialism.
As for the world's second major propaganda system, association of
socialism with the
Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce
conformity and
obedience to the
State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the
owners and
managers of these
institutions will be regarded as virtually a
natural law, the only alternative to the '
socialist'
dungeon."
--
Noam Chomsky,
Our Generation, Vol. 17, No. 2 (
Spring/
Summer 1986) pp. 47-52