Cries of election fraud by Donald Trump and his followers are familiar to Venezuelans; their right-wing opposition has been doing the same thing for years. I had a chance to observe this destabilizing strategy unfold on my first visit to Venezuela in 2005, an election year.
"Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo." ("They are afraid of us because we are not afraid of them.") This slogan was chanted by the thousands of demonstrators who defied the illegitimate de facto government imposed by the Honduran military in the protests that erupted throughout the country immediately after the after the coup of June 28, 2009. On a recent human rights delegation to Honduras, I was introduced to the role that fear plays in the political life of the country, and to the importance of the fact that so many people are ready to defy that fear.
Hegemony or Survival reminds me of another book by Chomsky that I read in 1960, my first year of graduate school in linguistics. Syntactic Structures had been published the year before, and it was setting off a revolution in the study of language, for Chomsky had shown linguists how to describe language from a radically different point of view.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019