Orwell says straight, look, in England what comes out in a free country is not very different from this totalitarian monster that I'm describing in the book. It's more or less the same. How come in a free country? He has two sentences, which are pretty accurate. One, he says, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And second - and I think this is much more important - a good education instills in you the intuitive understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say.

If scientists and scholars were to become "collectively self-organised and consciously activist" today, they would probably devote themselves to service to state and private power. Those who have different goals should (and do) become organized and activist.

The 50,000 Korean mercenaries we had in Vietnam were professional killers and just massacred people outright. And the American army did plenty of that too, but it couldn't take it after awhile. It's not the kind of job you can give to conscripts who are not trained to be murderers.

We should not want to permit providers, for example to have control over access.

There is extensive critical scholarship that provides illustrations in many areas of scholarship. I've discussed many cases myself, while also citing and often relying on academic studies that disentangle these webs of mystification woven for the general public. It's impossible to provide illustrations that would even approach accuracy, let alone carry any conviction, without going well beyond the bounds of this discussion.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

What is called 'capitalism'is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close cooperation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society.