The Trial of the Chicago 7: Encounters with Dellinger, Hoffman.
Saturday October 17, 2020
Just watched The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix. Excellent, moving, funny and provocative. The yippies were not just protesting clowns--they were deeply committed agitprop disrupters of the insane immorality manifest in the Vietnam War. In the mid-eighties I had the privilege of interviewing Abbie Hoffman, just a few years before his death.
A few years later I had the privilege again to interview David Dellinger, who said something I'll never forget: the Soviet Union was a failed experiment in political freedom without economic freedom; the United States (is) a failed experiment in economic freedom without political freedom.
Friends in the US. Please don't be a dupe for the temptations of outlandish conspiracy. The real conspiracy, as Noam Chomsky once said to Canadian broadcaster Peter Gzowsky, isn't a conspiracy at all--it is willful enactment of the corporate elite doing what serves them under the cloak of political and economic normalcy. Remakably, I also had the privilege to interview Chomsky in the same span of a year or so as I interviewed Abbie Hoffman. Chomsky doesn't 'interview' as much as answer the lead question with an encyclopedic intellectual dismantling of the military-prison-industrial complex. And he does so by calmly stating that the worst atrocities of 'state terrorism' are committed plainly in view of any citizen in the newspapers of record--the same newspapers towards which the current president and his enablers have strategically fomented and weaponized public contempt and distrust.
It seems evident to anyone with critical reasoning that the greater evil of this self-serving group of political economic bad actors is personified and in plain view in this moment in history, and you have the agency and means to reclaim your political freedom to restore balance by voting for decency and civility, as flawed as it may be in a two-party system.