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<h1 class="entry_title">Noam Chomsky: The drug war is the latest
manifestation of a centuries-old ‘race war’</h1>
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By Scott Kaufman<br>
<small><small><small><small><b><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/06/noam-chomsky-the-drug-war-is-the-latest-manifestation-of-a-centuries-old-race-war/">http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/06/noam-chomsky-the-drug-war-is-the-latest-manifestation-of-a-centuries-old-race-war/</a></b></small></small></small></small><br>
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Monday, January 6, 2014 12:10 EST</div>
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<p>Noam Chomsky recently <a
href="http://www.petroc.ac.uk/news/n1009/petroc-teams-up-with-mit-for-transatlantic-experience">took
part</a> in a video conference with Foundation Degree students about
the legacy of the American Civil Rights movement, where he described
the war on drugs as a “race war” against poor minorities.</p>
<p>When a student asked how “important Martin Luther King was to the
movement,” Chomsky replied by saying “that’s almost like asking how
important Nelson Mandela was to the anti-apartheid movement.” He then
returned to a point he had made earlier, that the assassination of
Black Panther <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton">Fred
Hampton</a> was the most significant of the period.</p>
<p>“Hampton was a very effective organizer…the most energetic and
effective leader,” and he was killed by the FBI and operatives for the
United States government, which Chomsky claimed created a necessarily
adversarial relationship between “liberation movements” and the
government. </p>
<p>Of course, he continued, that’s not the story the government wants
citizens to believe, so they were “blanked out.” </p>
<p>“There are things,” Chomsky said, “the white liberal establishment
just doesn’t want to be part of history.”</p>
<p>Another aspect of American history that was “blanked out” was “the
criminalizing of black life.” He noted that abolition robbed the
industrial class of cheap labor, and [they] needed a way to replace it.
“Slaves were capital, but if you could imprisoned labor, states could
utilize them — you get a disciplined, extremely cheap labor force that
you don’t have to pay for.”</p>
<p>“Part of the whole industrial revival was based on the reinstitution
of slave labor. That went on until the start of the Second World War,”
he continued, “after which black men and women were able to work their
way into the labor force, the war industries.”</p>
<p>“Then came two decades, the ’50s and the ’60s, of substantial
economic growth. Also, egalitarian growth — the lower quintile did
about the same as the upper quintile, and the black population was able
to work its way into the society. They could work in the auto
factories, make some money, buy a house. And over the course of those
same 20 years the Civil Rights Movement took off.”</p>
<p>After correlating the rise of the Civil Rights Movement with the
establishment of a black middle class, Chomsky went on to claim that it
was on the issue of class that the black liberation movements stalled.</p>
<p>“The black movement hit a limit as soon as it turned to class
issue,” he said. “There is a close class-race correlation, but as the
black and increasingly Latino issues…began to reach up against the
class barriers, there was a big reaction. Part of it was reinstitution
of the criminalization of the black population in the late 1970s.” </p>
<p>“If you take a look at the incarceration rate in the United States,
around 1980 it was approximately the same as the rest of developed
society. By now, it’s out of sight — it’s five-to-ten times as high as
the rest of wealthy societies.” </p>
<p>“It’s not based on crime,” Chomsky continued. “The device that was
used to recriminalize the black population was drugs. The drug wars are
fraud — a total fraud. They have nothing to do with drugs, the price of
drugs doesn’t change. What the drug war has succeeded in doing is to
criminalize the poor. And the poor in the United States happen to be
overwhelming black and Latino.”</p>
<p>Chomsky then made his most explosive statement, claiming that the
war on drugs is, in fact, “a race war.”</p>
<p>“It’s a race war. Almost entirely, from the first moment, the orders
given to the police as to how to deal with drugs were, ‘You don’t go
into the suburbs and arrest the white stockbroker sniffing coke in the
evening, but you do go into the ghettos, and if a kid has a joint in
his pocket, you put him in jail.’ So it starts with police action, not
the police themselves, but the orders given to them.”</p>
<p>“Then there’s the sentencing, which is grotesquely disproportionate
— then the highly punitive system instituted after, if anybody ever
gets out of prison.” He claimed that “[p]rison’s only about one thing:
punishment. They only learn one thing in prison, which is how to be a
criminal…and the result is like reinstating Jim Crow.”</p>
<p>“The black population now — they don’t call it ‘slavery,’ but it’s
under conditions of impoverishment and deprivation that are extremely
severe, so if you look at the past 400 years of United States history,
there have only been about 20 or 30 years of relative freedom for the
black population. And that’s a real scar on society.”</p>
<p>“The great achievement of the Civil Rights Movement,” he concluded,
“can’t be denied, but we shouldn’t overlook the fact that it set in
motion forces that would try to overturn those changes to protect class
privilege.”</p>
<p>Watch the entire teleconference with Noam Chomsky <b><small><small><small><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/06/noam-chomsky-the-drug-war-is-the-latest-manifestation-of-a-centuries-old-race-war/">http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/06/noam-chomsky-the-drug-war-is-the-latest-manifestation-of-a-centuries-old-race-war/</a></small></small></small></b></p>
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