Reexamining History with Chomsky: The Marshall Plan

The following video is a continuation of our series “Re-examining History”, which features an interview that we held with Prof. Noam Chomsky. Prof Chomsky will focus on historical developments that seldom, if at all, appear or are discussed in Western mainstream historical literature.

The following questions will be addressed in this video:

• Was the Marshall plan a success or failure?
• What sections of US & German society profited from the Marshall plan?

VIDEO: Reexamining History with Chomsky: The Marshall Plan

To read the transcript of this interview, click here. 

To see the previous videos of this series, click here.

To watch acTVism Munich’s video playlist on Noam Chomsky, click here.

Notable excerpts from the video:

Noam Chomsky on the reasons for the Marshall Plan:

“There was a big problem at the time, a major problem, of industrial overproduction. The US had a big surplus of industrial production, and the world just didn’t have markets. The world was virtually devastated by the war. So part of the attempt to create markets for US excess production was what I described before, ensuring that the former colonial areas would provide dollars to Europe, so they could purchase US industrial production, called triangular trade programs.”

Noam Chomsky about possible other reasons for the Marshall Plan:

“Incidentally, I think, about probably 2 billion dollars of the 13 billion dollars went for oil imports. That was part of the US effort to turn Europe into an oildependent economy. The United States controlled the oil, Europe had coal, not oil, same in Japan. They tried to turn them into oil-dependent economies; the reason that was expressed clearly by George Kennan was that if we did that we would have what he called veto power over their policies, because we would essentially control the energy spigots.”

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