When news of the planned privatisation of St David’s Hall in Cardiff reached renowned professor Noam Chomsky, he took the time to speak out against it. As well as being against it in principle, Chomsky also had a personal connection to the public concert hall having addressed a packed out crowd there in 2011.
Ahead of a major protest on Saturday, Adam Johannes of Cardiff People’s Assembly & Palestinian activist Ghaith Jayousi recall Chomsky’s visit and why a publicly run space was so important to making it happen.
By Adam Johannes. Image by voice.wales
This week I was delighted to receive a short letter from Noam Chomsky in solidarity with our battle to defend St David’s Hall from privatisation:
‘I had the great privilege of speaking at St David’s Hall a decade ago, the kind of public space that is of great value for a live and functioning democratic community. It would be a great shame to see it lost to private hands’.
It was strangely touching that a 94-year-old American-Jewish professor, one of the most famous public intellectuals of our age who is still writing and speaking truth to power into his old age, would take the time to include a community campaign in Cardiff among his prolific political interventions into global politics.
St David’s Hall would join other Chomsky interventions this week including calling for President Joe Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange; demanding an end to the illegal sixty year economic embargo of eleven million Cubans by the United States; support for a professor and trade unionist in India fired from his university; worries over the danger to democracy in Brazil from the hard right; and concern over the potential impact of ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence ‘ChatBot’ on the education system.
In 2011 I had the great honour to meet Noam Chomsky as part of a band of activists invited to join him for dinner when he visited Wales. Less than 24 hours later he would deliver a lecture on ‘The Crisis in the Middle East’ to a packed out audience at St David’s Hall.
Ghaith Jayousi was the organiser of the 2011 Chomsky. Then a Palestinian student at Cardiff University and an amateur classical pianist on the side, he recently shared some memories with me of the event and how St David’s Hall had helped:
‘Around a decade ago a group of young students from various backgrounds including anarchists, leftists, environmentalists and the Cardiff University Islamic Society joined forces to organise a talk at Cardiff University by one of the world’s most prominent thinkers, and one of the most vocal critical voices against Western imperialism and hegemony, Professor Noam Chomsky.’
The event was originally to be on campus, but the intervention of Prevent, the bogus government anti-extremism programme, put obstacles in the way:
‘Being naive to his huge popularity in the city, we were overwhelmed as we realised the venue that could fit 400 people at the university was way too limited to absorb the viral interest that was generated for the event. On top of that, as they came to realise the size of the event and the nature of the speaker, security personnel at the university became involved and started meddling in our organisation process as they insisted on the presence of armed personel in the venue, besides vetoing the idea of having a previously illegally detained Guantanamo Bay detainee to introduce the professor. This swayed us from holding the event in the kind of environment that the dissident thinker eagerly fought in his rich intellectual journey’.
In organising the event Ghaith would come to appreciate the community benefits of publicly owned venues over private venues:
‘But as we approached larger private venues, the sheer price of booking those, on top of the insurmountable fees that we, as young students, with no source of funding whatsoever, made it really hard to go through with those. That was the point when we approached St. David’s Hall’.
‘It stood out against all others to support the event with no strings attached. Knowing that we were students with no funding, they offered us the only kind of package that we could afford: A zero fee booking of the venue, with no penalty in case the event got cancelled for any reason and a process that would allow the venue to fund the event by charging a relatively not too expensive ticket price of £5 for a three hour event’.
The Chomsky lecture would be a memorable event in the city’s cultural life, as Ghaith recalled:
‘The main symphony hall sold out all 2,000 seats in a matter of hours. The day of the event was sensational: seeing St David’s Hall mixing an eclectic combination of ages and backgrounds in one beautiful celebration of the city’s diversity for the visit of such a renowned intellectual was a day that cannot be forgotten. people who couldn’t get tickets gathered on the outside and the hall was able to stream the event via screens for them’.
Meeting Noam Chomsky a decade ago what struck me then was the humility of the man. Despite being a world renowned academic, a prolific writer of books, a superstar of the international left, he chose not to impose his own ideas on all of us, rather he was far more interested in hearing all of our ideas and our opinions. He carefully listened to each of us, asking the occasional question in a spirit of intellectual inquiry as if we might all clarify our ideas through collective discussion together. Now and again he would offer a thought or two of his own, usually in the form of a question to provoke further thought.
It should come as no surprise that Noam Chomsky would lend his great moral authority to a community battle against a multinational.
The political commitment of Noam Chomsky dates back decades. Having revolutionised the field of linguistics, Chomsky could have easily reaped the rewards of a comfortable life in the very highest ivory towers of academia, instead in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, he wrote an important essay, The Responsibility of Intellectuals.
Haunted by the violence of his government’s daily bombardment of Vietnam, Chomsky began thinking back to being an undergraduate student at the end of the Second World War. Social critic Dwight Macdonald had published a series of articles turning on the head the question of German and Japanese people’s responsibilities for the atrocities committed by their government, by asking to what extent were the American people responsible ‘for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history’.
Chomsky would argue intellectuals had a moral duty to
1. Speak truth to power and expose the lies.
2. Provide the historical context.
3. Lift the veil of ideology, the political framework of ideas in a society that limits the boundaries of the debate.
Chomsky practiced what he preached. Risking joblessness, imprisonment, and losing his career in academia, he would march against the Vietnam War and repeatedly be arrested as he signed up to acts of mass civil disobedience outside the Pentagon, outside arms factories, outside the seats of power to try and stop the war and wake his country up.
Chomsky would refuse to pay half his taxes in protest at involuntarily contributing to the American war machine. He publicly stood with students opposing the draft. As an act of educational solidarity he visited Vietnam to deliver lectures to Vietnamese students whose country was being destroyed by his government, and he toured refugee camps in southeast Asia. He would become the most well known, longstanding, and trenchant critics of his own government’s foreign policy.
For those of us of a certain vintage, Chomsky will always be a point of reference. Growing up in a council house in a small market town, our world was small. We did not have the internet. We had public libraries and we had Noam Chomsky books. Chomsky books were where I found important information to understand global current affairs.
One bitterly cold day before Christmas I joined around sixty to seventy local residents picketing a Cardiff Council debate on the future of St David’s Hall. As I stood there freezing, I suddenly remembered those old Chomsky library books.
People of all ages and all walks of life had gathered. We were all upset that as a consequence of the limited politics of local councillors, the National Concert Hall of Wales might fall into the claws of AMG/Live Nation.
Live Nation are an American-owned aggressively commercial private company seeking a global monopoly on live music. Globally their venues have been linked to 200 deaths since 2006, most recently at the Brixton Academy. Critics say the deaths happen because the multinational company cuts corners in health and safety in pursuit of profit.
Asked to say a few words, I could think of no better thing to say than to quote Noam Chomsky,
‘Privatisation does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person. It means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny’.
Riffing on Chomsky’s insight, we can also mock the ‘guarantees’ that Labour councillors claimed to have had from AMG/Live Nation over the handover of St David’s Hall. ‘Cast-iron guarantees’ very often rapidly become ‘diluted promises’.
But the moment privatisation happens there is nothing that any of us would be able to do about it – as we no longer would own it. We democratically elect a city council, so there is still some small shred of democratic accountability, but we never get a vote on who sits on the management board of a multinational corporation.
Our next protest is on Saturday 18 February. We will assemble at 2 pm outside Cardiff Central Library to raise our voices loudly against council plans to privatise St David’s Hall, close down the Museum of Cardiff, and slash library opening times. We are asking everyone to bring a book to hold up as a talisman of our humanity versus their austerity. Maybe you have a Noam Chomsky book to bring? Or perhaps you prefer a good novel.
We have dubbed our protest, The People’s March for Dignity and Culture. It is called by Cardiff People’s Assembly and many community and cultural groups and trade unions will be joining in. After a mass ‘read-in’ protest outside the library we intend to symbolically reclaim our city from the economic forces of austerity by weaving our way in large numbers around ‘the cultural triangle’ on The Hayes of Cardiff Central Library, St David’s Hall and the Museum of Cardiff: Join us!
