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* Excellent.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! Im Amy Goodman in Boston, as we sit down with Noam Chomsky for a public conversation. I asked him about the arrest of Julian Assange.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the Assange arrest is scandalous in several respects. One of them is just the effort of governmentsand its not just the U.S. government. The British are cooperating. Ecuador, of course, is now cooperating. Sweden, before, had cooperated. The efforts to silence a journalist who was producing materials that people in power didnt want the rascal multitude to know aboutOK?thats basically what happened. WikiLeaks was producing things that people ought to know about those in power. People in power dont like that, so therefore we have to silence it. OK? This is the kind of thing, the kind of scandal, that takes place, unfortunately, over and over.
To take another example, right next door to Ecuador, in Brazil, where the developments that have gone on are extremely important. This is the most important country in Latin America, one of the most important in the world. Under the Lula government early in this millennium, Brazil was the mostmaybe the most respected country in the world. It was the voice for the Global South under the leadership of Lula da Silva. Notice what happened. There was a coup, soft coup, to eliminate the nefarious effects of the labor party, the Workers Party. These are described by the World Banknot me, the World Bankas the golden decade in Brazils history, with radical reduction of poverty, a massive extension of inclusion of marginalized populations, large parts of the populationAfro-Brazilian, indigenouswho were brought into the society, a sense of dignity and hope for the population. That couldnt be tolerated.
After Lulasafter he left office, a kind of a soft coup takes placeI wont go through the details, but the last move, last September, was to take Lula da Silva, the leading, the most popular figure in Brazil, who was almost certain to win the forthcoming election, put him in jail, solitary confinement, essentially a death sentence, 25 years in jail, banned from reading press or books, and, crucially, barred from making a public statementunlike mass murderers on death row. This, in order to silence the person who was likely to win the election. Hes the most important political prisoner in the world. Do you hear anything about it?
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/noam-chomsky-americas-extraterritorial-reach-is-its-own-scandal/