Democracy Now is a daily radio and news program with over 500 station collaborating. It specializes in free, independent and open journalism (free from biases, I mean!)
They also publish transcripts of interviews in both English and Spanish, so it is an essential instrument in trying to get an idea of what is happening in the world. My friend Gabriel Moreno Plaza (read HipercrÃtica) just sent me the transcript of award-winning journalist Amy Goodman’s interview with Noam Chomsky (MIT’s enfant terrible, linguist professor and free thinker) and Howard Zinn (historian, author of bestselling “A People’s History of the United States”).
This is an interview on Iraq, Vietnam, Activism and History, and it deals also with Palestinian and Israel issues, and more. The interview is availabe in English (in two parts), y en Español.
After reading it, I have a stronger sense that we need to get our information from many channels and sift from them with eyes wide open. Too much information gets to us filtered and washed out. For instance, it appears from the interview that a lot of the common assumptions on the Israel-Palestinian conflict are unfounded and suffer from biases. Vietnam’s (and Cambodia’s) history should teach, but has not.
Some words on patriotism from Zinn are really interesting:
Government is set up–and here’s what a Declaration of Independence is about, government is set up by the people in order to fulfill certain responsibilities: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And according to the Declaration of Independence when the government violates those responsibilities, then, and these are the words of the Declaration of Independence, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government.
In other’s words the government is not holy, the government is not to be obeyed when the government is wrong. So to me patriotism in it’s best sense means thinking about the people in the country, the principals for which the country stands for, and it requires opposing the government when the government violates those principles.
Democracy Now can be heard all over the US. In Puerto Rico, tune to Radio Universidad de Puerto Rico 4 – 5 p.m., on Thursdays.
