so if we, you know, if one wants to talk about, again, the real world, But, yeh, the, the trouble is, the first emotion of, the first emotion of… you don-, you’re al-, your difficulty, Mister Chomsky, is you, in my judgment, you never know where neatly to begin your historical, uh, uh, Hmm, well, sequence of… well, well you choose the point of beginning. Well, well the point, the point really is that, uh, if you st-, if you’re starting to say that nineteen fifty-nine was a provocation because there were, No, it wasn’t a provocation; the south was going north. I say I definitely don’t claim that a provocation begins… OK, but how about the people who were going from north to south who were talking about the misery that had been brought about by Ho Chi Minh and so forth? When? When, when was that? What’s that? Now which people are you talking about? I don’t know. Well, well, I’m talking about the Vietnamese, north and south. You, your, your trouble, I think, Do you?… is neatly captured in, in, in the remark made recently by Czechoslovakia, that, uh, Czechoslovakia is, after all, the most neutralist country in the world, since it declines to interfere even with it’s own internal affairs, and, and, uh… I’m afraid I don’t support that— see the relevance of— Well, uh, wha-, wha-, that remark. what the relevance of that remark is simply that, uh, that you, you, you start your line of discussion at a moment that is, uh, historically useful for you, You, you, that’s what I was saying, at it’s most, that you, you pick the beginning. the post-war world You pick the beginning. is that the communists— communist-imperialists— by the use of terrorism, by the use of, by deprivation of freedom, American Terror libretto © Jeffrey Lependorf 2008
43