johnlucas

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor of
linguistics, anarchist thinker, and political analyst.

§=Sourced=§
=On politics and economics=

"Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them
in, in the first place."
Source: Talk titled "Government in the Future" at the Poetry Center of the
New York YM-YWHA, February 16, 1970

"The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a
particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and
look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers,
but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by
some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat."
Source: In Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970

"A lot of the people who call themselves Left I would regard as
proto-fascists."
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. Middle East policy, May 14, 1984 (some
examples)

"In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There
are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party,
the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In
fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices.
In the 1984 election, for example, there was actually an issue, which often
there isn't. The issue was Keynesian growth versus fiscal conservatism. The
Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth: big spending, deficits, and
so on. The Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: watch the money
supply, worry about the deficits, et cetera. Now, I didn't see a single
comment pointing out that the two parties had completely reversed their
traditional positions. Traditionally, the Democrats are the party of
Keynesian growth, and the Republicans the party of fiscal conservatism. So
doesn't it strike you that something must have happened? Well, actually, it
makes sense. Both parties are essentially the same party. The only question
is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now
and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a
narrow spectrum."
Source: Interview by Adam Jones, February 20, 1990

"Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of
convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has
been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even
praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in
the classic formulation. Now, it has long been understood, very well, that a
society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can
only persist, with whatever suffering and injustice that it entails, as long
as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create
are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is
an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history either one of two things
is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own
destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values
of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will
be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in
a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests
that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require
rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and
by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged
elite should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they
tell us they must -- namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and
deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The
question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be
preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human
existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they
may well be essential to survival."
Source: In Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

"Ricardo's "science" was founded on the principle that capital is more or
less immobile and labor highly mobile. We are enjoined today to worship the
consequences of Ricardo's science, despite the fact that the assumptions on
which they are based have been reversed: capital is highly mobile, and labor
virtually immobile -- libertarian conservatives lead the way in rejecting
Adam Smith's principle that "free circulation of labor" is a cornerstone of
free trade, in keeping with their contempt for markets (except for the
weak)."
Source: Z Magazine, February 1995

"Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States,
along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that
dependence will lead to "subservience and venality", and will "suffocate[s]
the germs of virtue". And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which
was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles. There's a
modern perversion of conservatism and libertarianism, which has changed the
meanings of words, pretty much the way Orwell discussed. So nowadays,
dependence refers to something else. When you listen to what's going in
Congress, and people talk about dependence, what they mean by dependence is
public support for hungry children, not wage labor. Dependence is support
for hungry children and mothers who are caring for them. [...] We see this
very dramatically right at this moment in Congress, under the leadership of
Newt Gingrich, who quite demonstrably is the leading welfare freak in the
country. He is the most avid advocate of welfare in the country, except he
wants it to go to the rich. His own district in Cobb County Georgia gets
more federal subsidies than any suburban county in the country, outside of
the federal system itself... And it's supposed to continue, because this
kind of welfare dependency is good. Dependent children, that's bad. But
dependent executives, that's good. You gotta make sure they keep feeding at
the public trough. [...] the nation is not an entity, it's divided into
economic classes, and the architects of policy are those who have the
economic power. In his days, he said, the merchants and manufacturers of
England, who make sure that their interests are "most peculiarly attended
to", like Gingrich. Whatever the effect on others, including the people of
England. To Adam Smith, that was a truism. To James Madison, that was a
truism. Nowadays, you're supposed to recoil in horror and call it vulgar
Marxism or something, meaning that Adam Smith and James Madison must have
been disciples of Marx. And if you believe the rest of the story, you might
as well believe that. But those are facts which you can easily discover if
you bothered reading the sacred texts, that you're supposed to worship, but
not read."
Source: Talk titled "Education and Democracy" at Michigan State University,
March 28, 1995

"I compared some passages of articles of [Robert McNamara] in the late
1960s, speeches, on management and the necessity of management, how a
well-managed society controlled from above was the ultimate in freedom. The
reason is if you have really good management and everything's under control
and people are told what to do, under those conditions, he said, man can
maximize his potential. I just compared that with standard Leninist views on
vanguard parties, which are about the same. About the only difference is
that McNamara brought God in, and I suppose Lenin didn't bring God in. He
brought Marx in."
Source: Class Warfare, 1995

""Tough love" is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged,
tough for everyone else."
Source: Powers and Prospects, 1996

"The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making
from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes,
priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern
corporations."
Source: Z Magazine, May 1998

"No individual gets up and says, I'm going to take this because I want it.
He'd say, I'm going to take it because it really belongs to me and it would
be better for everyone if I had it. It's true of children fighting over
toys. And it's true of governments going to war. Nobody is ever involved in
an aggressive war; it's always a defensive war -- on both sides."
Source: Interview by Tor Wennerberg, November 1998

"...jingoism, fear, racism, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of
appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for
policies that are really intended to crush them."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"Well, law is a bit like a printing press -- it's kind of neutral, you can
make it do anything. I mean, what lawyers are taught in law school is
chicanery: how to convert words on paper into instruments of power. And
depending where the power is, the law will mean different things."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"The United States is deeply in debt -- that was part of the whole
Reagan/Bush program, in fact: to put the country so deeply in debt that
there would be virtually no way for the government to pursue programs of
social spending anymore. And what "being in debt" really means is that the
Treasury Department has sold a ton of securities -- bonds and notes and so
on -- to investors, who then trade them back and forth on the bond market.
Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, by now about $150 billion a day
worth of U.S. Treasury securities alone is traded this way. The article then
explained what this means: it means that if the investing community which
holds those securities doesn't like any U.S. government policies, it can
very quickly sell off just a tiny signal amount of Treasury bonds, and that
will have the automatic effect of raising the interest rate, which then will
have the further automatic effect of increasing the deficit. Okay, this
article calculated that if such a "signal" sufficed to raise the interest
rate by 1 percent, it would add $20 billion to the deficit overnight --
meaning if Clinton (say in someone's dream) proposed a $20 billion social
spending program, the international investing community could effectively
turn it into a $40 billion program instantly, just by a signal, and any
further moves in that direction would be totally cut off."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"...so long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody,
has to be committed to one overriding goal: and that's to make sure that the
rich folk are happy -- because unless they are, nobody else is going to get
anything. So if you're a homeless person sleeping in the streets of
Manhattan, let's say, your first concern must be that the guys in the
mansions are happy -- because if they're happy, then they'll invest, and the
economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will
trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they're not happy,
everything's going to grind to a halt, and you're not even going to get
anything trickling down."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"The World Bank is not the IMF. It is considerably more responsive to
popular forces, and has a mixed history. A great deal of what it has done
has been awful. Some is quite constructive. There has been a shift in policy
in recent years towards poverty reduction, support for popular initiatives,
etc., I think a response to very powerful popular currents around the world.
In some cases I know of personally it has gone well beyond rhetoric. To what
extent this is true is another matter. [...] Many of its projects are highly
meritorious. Just to mention one example, where I happened to have some
personal contact, there is a fine project in Colombia, directed by a very
courageous priest who has been a leader in human rights activities for
years, to try to carve out a "zone of peace" in a huge area, about the size
of El Salvador -- that is, an area in which towns and villages refuse to
participate with any of the terrorist groups -- the military, paramilitary,
the guerrillas -- and ask to be left alone by them and pursue their own
social and economic projects in peace. That takes plenty of courage in
Colombia. It has had some success. It relies heavily on World Bank grants.
Do we want that terminated? Do we have some suggestion as to how to replace
it?"
Source: ZNet forum reply, March 17, 2004 / Source: ZNet forum reply, July
29, 2004

"I mean, what's the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth,
political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same
secret society where you're trained to be a ruler - they both can run
because they're financed by the same corporate institutions. At the
Democratic Convention, Barack Obama said, 'only in this country, only in
America, could someone like me appear here.' Well, in some other countries,
people much poorer than him would not only talk at the convention - they'd
be elected president. Take Lula. The president of Brazil is a guy with a
peasant background, a union organizer, never went to school, he's the
president of the second-biggest country in the hemisphere. Only in America?
I mean, there they actually have elections where you can choose somebody
from your own ranks. With different policies. That's inconceivable in the
United States."
Source: Interview by Wallace Shawn, October 19, 2004

"The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries,
who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill."
Source: ZNet forum reply, December 19, 2004

"The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very
explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else
in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle
predicts almost everything that's happening."
Source: Interview by Steve Scher on KUOW, in Seattle, Washington, April 20,
2005
[edit]


=Conservatism=

"The political policies that are called conservative these days would appal
any genuine conservative, if there were one around to be appalled. For
example, the central policy of the Reagan Administration - which was
supposed to be conservative - was to build up a powerful state. The state
grew in power more under Reagan than in any peacetime period, even if you
just measure it by state expenditures. The state intervention in the economy
vastly increased. That's what the Pentagon system is, in fact; it's the
creation of a state-guaranteed market and subsidy system for high-technology
production. There was a commitment under the Reagan Administration to
protect this more powerful state from the public, which is regarded as the
domestic enemy. Take the resort to clandestine operations in foreign policy:
that means the creation of a powerful central state immune from public
inspection. Or take the increased efforts at censorship and other forms of
control. All of these are called "conservatism," but they're the very
opposite of conservatism. Whatever the term means, it involves a concern for
Enlightenment values of individual rights and freedoms against powerful
external authorities such as the state, a dominant Church, and so on. That
kind of conservatism no one even remembers anymore."
Source: Interview by Adam Jones, February 20, 1990

"There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not
have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives,
like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical
statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the
rich."
Source: Interview by Ira Shorr, February 11, 1996

"If there was anyone who actually fit the category of conservative, if there
was such a category of people, they would have a very easy way to deal with
the fact that 60% of the children under 2 [in Nicaragua] are suffering
probable brain damage. Namely, by paying their debts. Simple conservative
principle. But that's beyond unthinkable. Compassionate conservatives might
want to go beyond that, if they existed. But they're much more interested in
making political capital over the fact that a woman in a vegetative state
shouldn't be allowed to die in dignity."
Source: Talk at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, March 22, 2005
[edit]


=Capitalism=

"Personally I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central
institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under
capitalism we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in
which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic
control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in
political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and
strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little
bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly
straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to
economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under
the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk
about democracy."
Source: Business Today, May 1973

"...capitalism is basically a system where everything is for sale, and the
more money you have, the more you can get. And, in particular, that's true
of freedom. Freedom is one of the commodities that is for sale, and if you
are affluent, you can have a lot of it. It shows up in all sorts of ways. It
shows up if you get in trouble with the law, let's say, or in any aspect of
life it shows up. And for that reason it makes a lot of sense, if you accept
capitalist system, to try to accumulate property, not just because you want
material welfare, but because that guarantees your freedom, it makes it
possible for you to amass that commodity. [...] what you're going to find is
that the defense of free institutions will largely be in the hands of those
who benefit from them, namely the wealthy, and the powerful. They can
purchase that commodity and, therefore, they want those institutions to
exist, like free press, and all that."
Source: Interview by David Dobereiner, John Hess, Doug Richardson & Tom
Woodhull, January 1974

"Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a
lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it
doesn't interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property,
that interferes with your right to have that property, you don't have it, I
have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to
freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of
property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this,
maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it's very
different from other rights."
Source: The Common Good, September 24, 1997

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism it's a bit of a joke.
There's no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing
to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets
are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had
free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states,
England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention
to protect private power, and still do. That's right up to the present. I
mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in
post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the
United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention:
computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you
just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public,
meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the
costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. That's very remote from
a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple
hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."
Source: Talk titled "Sovereignty and World Order" at Kansas State
University, September 20, 1999

"Remember, every business firm, like even a mom and pop grocery store, is a
market imperfection. A firm is defined in economic theory as a market
imperfection introduced to deal with transaction costs. And the sort of
theory is that the imperfections, the firms, are kinda like little islands
in a free market sea. But the problem with that is that the sea doesn't
remotely resemble a free market, and the islands are bigger than the sea; so
that raises some questions about the picture. But these market
imperfections, like a firm, or a transnational corporation, or a strategic
alliance among them, this is a form of administering interchanges. And
there's a real question about whether we want to accept that. Why, for
example, should the international socioeconomic system, or for that matter
our own society, be in the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies? That's
a decision, it's not a law of nature."
Source: Talk titled "U.S. Foreign Policy in a Globalized World" at Johns
Hopkins University, Maryland], March 13, 2000

"Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only
rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college. If you take an
economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are
supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to
maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic
because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others
because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody
participates and therefore it's called democratic. Well, suppose that we
believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made,
you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are
going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any
votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays
attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because
what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by
wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and
militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of
institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the
policies are rational."
Source: Interview by Yifat Susskind, August 2001

"See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist -- it can exploit racism for
its purposes, but racism isn't built into it. Capitalism basically wants
people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on
the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be
functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or
something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term,
you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist -- just because it's anti-human.
And race is in fact a human characteristic -- there's no reason why it
should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So
therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that
people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable
cogs who will purchase all the junk that's produced -- that's their ultimate
function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant,
and usually a nuisance."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"...there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical
liberalism and capitalism -- and that's why when the University of Chicago
publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text
(which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly
opposed to all of the idiocy they now sprout in his name."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002
[edit]


=Libertarianism (U.S. variant)=

"By comparative standards, the country is undertaxed. And it's also
regressively taxed, the tax burden falls mostly on the poor. What we need is
a progressive tax system, of, incidently, the kind that Jefferson advocated.
You know, traditional libertarians, like Jefferson, advocated sharply
progressive taxes, because they wanted a system of relative equality,
knowing that that's a prerequisite for democracy. Jefferson specifically
advocated it. We don't have it anymore, it's sort of there in legislation
but it's gone. What we need is different social policies. And social
policies which ought to be funded by the people who are gonna benefit from
it, that's the general public. So we'd be a lot better off if we were higher
taxed, and it was used for proper purposes. And we know what those are. I
mean, for example, for women taking care of children. You know, it makes
sense to pay them for that work, they're doing important work for the
society. [applause] And they should be paid for it, but that requires tax
payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment."
Source: Talk titled "Education and Democracy" at Michigan State University,
March 28, 1995

"In a dictatorship, taxation is theft. In a true democratic community,
people make decisions, including decisions about how to deal with problems
of concern to the community, like schools, health services, transportation,
etc. Insofar as this leads to expenditures, they make decisions about taxes
or some counterpart. There is no theft. Societies like ours are somewhere in
between. To take your case, suppose your neighbor never uses a road or a bus
at the other end of town. Why should he fund it? Maybe we should each just
pay for the roads we use -- and that means, of course, that we have to
prevent others from using them, so we hire private armies, and if someone
comes along with a bigger army we get nuclear weapons to keep them from
using our road, and... Actually, proposals like this are made, in all
seriousness, in literature that is taken seriously. And it extends to
everything else, leading to a world in which no sane person would want to
live, even if it would be possible to survive in it."
Source: ZNet forum reply, June 28, 2004
[edit]


=On education=

"If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are,
ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to
believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own
background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very
disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that
makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're
an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's
idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through
the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with
a good job."
Source: Interview by Charles M. Young in Rolling Stone, May 28, 1992

"There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and
mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the
other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the
factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology.
It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a
harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution
as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in
chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow."
Source: In Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, July 22, 1992

"Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate
growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in
teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe
ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what
it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested.
Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of
driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] [...] normal
interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in
ways we don't understand."
Source: Conference titled "Creation & Culture" in Barcelona, Spain, November
25, 1992

"Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile,
passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think
people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a
lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also
understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're
educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them,
what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what
Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The
anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is
really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets,
the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be
careful to cage it somehow."
Source: Class Warfare, 1995

"Because they don't teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on
beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools
were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students
with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave
democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need
to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system
usually is."
Source: Chomsky on Miseducation, 1999

"So when you go to graduate school in the natural sciences, you're
immediately brought into critical inquiry - and, in fact, what you're
learning is kind of a craft; you don't really teach science, people sort of
get the idea how to do it as apprentices, hopefully by working with good
people. But the goal is to learn how to do creative work, and to challenge
everything [...] people have to be trained for creativity and disobedience -
because there is no other way you can do science. But in the humanities and
social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on [...]
people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept
things, and not to question too much."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too
much."
Source: KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 5, 2003
(context: João Goulart)
[edit]


=On media and propaganda=

"Here is what [George Kennan] had to say, and it's revealing: "[...] we have
about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. [...] In
this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our
real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which
will permit us to maintain this position of disparity [...] We need not
deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and
world-benefaction. We should cease to talk about vague and [...] unreal
objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and
democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in
straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic
slogans, the better." Now of course, the idealistic slogans are still needed
for the media, for a lot of scholarship, for the schools, and so on. But,
where the serious people are, the problem is that we have to maintain this
disparity, and obviously it's gotta be maintained by force. So none of the
idealistic slogans at home. So when you're setting up death squads in El
Salvador under the Alliance for Progress, you're not hampered by these
idealistic slogans - that's for the masses, for us. Well, given this kind of
thinking, it's not too surprising that President Kennedy should say, with
regard to El Salvador after supporting a military coup there, that

"Governments of the civil-military type of El Salvador are the most
effective in containing communist penetration in Latin America." This at the
time when he organized the basic framework for the death squads that have
been torturing and murdering ever since, and which we attribute to some kind
of extreme right-wingers who somehow we can't get under control."
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, May
14, 1984

"We have a big argument here about whether Nicaragua and Cuba are sending
arms to El Salvador. Well, I don't know, so far there's no evidence that
they are, but that's not really the interesting question. I mean, you gotta
watch the way questions are framed by the propaganda system. The way it's
framed is, the doves say they're not sending arms, and the hawks say they
are sending arms. But the real question, which is being suppressed in all of
this, is, "Should they be sending arms?" And the answer is of course, "Yes."
[applause] Everybody should be sending arms. You see, that question is not
raised. Just as if, somebody was talking in, say, the Soviet Union, and the
question came up, "Should somebody send arms to Afghan rebels?" Well, of
course not, you know, that's terrorism or something like that. The point is
that it's perfectly legitimate to send arms to people who finally try to use
violence in self-defense against a gang of mass murderers installed by a
foreign power. Of course it's legitimate to send them arms."
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, May
14, 1984

"On september 1st of last year, the Soviet Union shot down Korean KAL 007,
killing 269 people, and the immediate response here was that this proves
that the Russians are the most barbaric people since Attila the Hun or
something, and therefore we have to step up the attack against Nicaragua,
set in MX missiles, put Pershings in West Germany, and increase the military
system. In fact, the immediate main reaction here was great euphoria on Wall
Street, where commentators pointed out that defense stocks have never looked
better, you know, the big rise in defense stocks. All of this was because of
this barbarous act, which is the worst thing that ever happened in human
history. The story was given unbelievable coverage. Not only the story, but
the American government interpretation of it, which is roughly what I've
just said, was given the kind of coverage that I doubt has ever been given
to any story in history... Just to give you an indication, the New York
Times publishes an index volume, very densely printed thing, you practically
need a magnifying glass to read it, big pages... For the month of September
alone, the index volume is 7 pages, just on this... And it's all from the
standpoint of the government, namely, here're these unbelievable monsters,
for no reason other than sadistic love of massacre, killed 269 innocent
people. Well, the government story gradually eroded and collapsed, and now
basically nothing's left of it, except some funny questions. Like, what was
that Korean airliner actually doing over the most sensitive area of Russian
airspace? And why didn't the American reconnaissance jets nearby, RC-135
or... Why didn't they signal to the plane, as they certainly had the ability
to do, to get out of the region? And what was it doing there in the first
place, how come it was on a great circle route? It's very hard to imagine by
a navigational error. There're all kinds of questions like that, and those
questions have essentially collapsed the government case, as was sort of
quietly admitted in the small print after the political capital has been
made. But there're some other things, which are never discussed, which I
think are even more important. So let me mention a couple. Right in the
middle of all of this furor about the Korean airliner, on Novermber 11th in
fact, there was a 100 word item in the New York Times, devoted to the
interesting fact that UNITA, which is a group that we call "freedom
fighters", supported by us and South Africa, in Angola, they took credit for
shooting down a civilian Angolan jet, killing 126 people. Now, there was no
RC-135 in the area, confusing the issue, maybe jamming radar. It was just
pure, plain, premeditated murder. Got 100 words in the New York Times.
February 9th this year, UNITA took credit for downing another civilian jet.
That one wasn't even mentioned, you gotta read the foreign press to find
that one out. Now, under the very confused circumstances of KAL 007, if that
was the worst atrocity in human history, well, what about the freedom
fighters that we support along with South Africa? Who did something much
worse, they just purposely shot down a civilian jet. I mean, granted, the
only people killed were black or something, but putting that aside, why is
it any different? In fact, it's a lot worse. And in fact, since we're the
ones who support them, we're the worst barbarians in history, way worse than
the Russians. So let's go back a little further, those who have a little bit
of memory could remember some other cases. For example, in October 1976, a
Cubana airliner was blown up, with 76 people killed, including the Olympic
gold medal winning fencing team of Cuba, and the bomb was placed on the
plane by the CIA. It was placed by a CIA agent, he's known, he continued to
be a CIA agent, continued to carry out other atrocities... Or let's go back
a little further. In February 1973, Israel shot down a civilian jet over the
Sinai, killing 110 people. The plane was lost in a sand storm. It was about
2 minutes flight time away from Cairo. No confusion, no ambiguity. The
orders came from the highest center of the high command. Now this was sort
of noticed, there were a couple of references to this in the middle of the
KAL 007 business. Predictably, a series of lies were produced, in the New
York Times and elsewhere, saying that the situation was totally different
because Israel has taken responsibility and paid compensation. If you look
back, you find that Israel did not take responsibility, and refused to pay
compensation. They agreed to something else, what's called ex gratia
compensation, meaning just sort of pure humanitarian aid, which is easy
enough because we paid for it. But they refused to pay compensation, because
that would imply responsibility, and they refused any responsibility. In
fact, what they did is exactly what the Russians did: they put a couple of
pilots on television, and they told how what they did was exactly right and
just, and they tried to blame the French pilot, he didn't know how to fly...
Couple of days after that, Golda Meir came to Washington. She was asked no
embarrassing questions about this; the press didn't bother. And she returned
home with new military aircrafts. That's the way we responded in that case.
There was also editorial comment. The New York Times, which was outraged
beyond anything about the Russians, it also had something to say in this
case. It had an editorial saying that "No useful purpose is served by
acrimonious debate over assignment of blame". That was the phrase in this
situation of tension... Well, if you look back a little further, you can
find other things too. For example, in 1955 an Air-India plane was blown up,
with many people killed. In fact, including the people killed was the whole
Chinese delegation to the Bandung Conference, the neutralist conference that
was held in Indonesia. Turned out the bomb was planted by a CIA agent, who
later defected and told the story... The purpose of the operation was to
kill Zhou Enlai, who was supposed to be on the plane but by accident had
gotten off. So they killed the rest of the delegation, plus everybody else,
but not him... And if you bother, you'll find other cases too. All of this
is ignored. The one case which was even mentioned, the Israeli one, was
falsified... While we have this huge hysteria whipped up about the worst
monsters in history... And the press went along with this, virtually 100%.
The LA Times is the only newspaper in the US that I know of, that published
an honest account of the Israeli case, by Robert Scheer. He published a
straight factual account, which gave essentially what I've just said. The
other cases were never mentioned -- maybe there's something that I've
missed -- but the rest of the press didn't mention any of this stuff. Now,
here is an example of the way a really well-disciplined propaganda system
works. Total obedience, total subservience to state propaganda. When the
state says, "Whip up hysteria against the evil empire", everybody starts
yelling, jumping up and down, and screaming about the evil empire... [Q: how
do you pull that off?] That's a very interesting question. See, if it
happened in, say, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, we know how they pulled
it off. Namely, an order came from the Ministry of Truth, and everybody had
to obey it. Now that didn't happen here. Here it happened in the way
American propaganda always works: by servility and cowardice and class
interest. In other words, we have a relatively centralized media, and there
are great advantages to subordinating yourself to external power, which in
fact represents your interests anyhow. The mass media are basically big
corporations, and they share the interests of other major corporations,
which means the interests represented by the state. So it's not too
surprising that they'd tend to support state power; what is interesting is
the uniformity, the virtual lack of deviance. The fact that in a country as
complex as this, one article should appear, referring to one of these
incidents, and the others I suppose were barely reported at all. This is
something that you find over and over again when looking at the American
propaganda system. So for example, take the invasion of South Vietnam. How
did we succeed, for 22 years, in preventing essentially 100% of scholarship
from referring to a historical event that occured. Namely, the American
invasion of South Vietnam. There is no such event. Take a look in the
encyclopedias, the history books, the specialized monographs, and you'll see
that there's no such event as the invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, or
agression against South Vietnam - it's just not there... We have a very
intricate system, and it does it with consummate skill, and with great
success. So on major issues, you just get no deviation at all."
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, May
14, 1984

"The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire,
[...]"
Commonly rephrased as: "Any dictator would admire the uniformity and
obedience of the [U.S.] media."
Source: Turning the Tide, 1985

"...Board of Directors have to make certain kinds of decisions, and those
decisions are pretty narrowly constrained. They have to be committed to
increasing profit share and market share. That means they're going to be
forced to try to limit wages, to limit quality, to use advertising in a way
that sells goods even if the product is lousy. Who tells them to do this?
Nobody. But if they stopped doing it, they'd be out of business. Similarly,
if an editorial writer for the New York Times were to start, say, telling
the truth about the Panama invasion -- which is almost inconceivable,
because to become an editorial writer you'd already have gone through a
filtering process which would weed out the non-conformists -- well, the
first thing that would happen is you'd start getting a lot of angry phone
calls from investors, owners, and other sectors of power. That would
probably suffice. If it didn't, you'd simply see the stock start falling.
And if they continued with it systematically, the New York Times would be
replaced by some other organ. After all, what is the New York Times? It's
just a corporation. If investors and advertisers don't want to support it,
and the government doesn't want to give it the special privileges and
advantages that make it a "newspaper of record," it's out of business."
Source: Interview by Adam Jones, February 20, 1990

"...the point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that
they don't mean anything [...] that's the whole point of good propaganda.
You want to create a slogan that nobody is gonna be against and I suppose
everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it
doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your
attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our
policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about."
Source: Interview on WBAI, January 1992

"...sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and
reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority,
the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for
others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the
bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves
with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable -- if they see
too much of reality they may set themselves to change it."
Source: What Uncle Sam Really Wants, 1993

"I never criticized United States planners for mistakes in Vietnam. True,
they made some mistakes, but my criticism was always aimed at what they
aimed to do and largely achieved. The Russians doubtless made mistakes in
Afghanistan, but my condemnation of their aggression and atrocities never
mentioned those mistakes, which are irrelevant to the matter -- though not
for the commissars. Within our ideological system, it is impossible to
perceive that anyone might criticize anything but "mistakes" (I suspect that
totalitarian Russia was more open in that regard)."
Source: In Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, March 31, 1995

"[The "liberal media"] love to be denounced from the right, and the right
loves to denounce them, because that makes them look like courageous
defenders of freedom and independence while, in fact, they are imposing all
of the presuppositions of the propaganda system."
Source: Interview by Ira Shorr, February 11, 1996

"I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're
saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you
wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
Source: Interview by Andrew Marr on BBC2, February 14, 1996

"Reform is a word you always ought to watch out for. Like, when Mao started
the Cultural Revolution it wasn't called a reform; reform is a change that
you're supposed to like. So as soon as you hear the word reform you can
reach for your wallet and see who's lifting it. [...] Subsidy is another
interesting word, kinda like reform. It's a subsidy if public funds are used
for public purposes, that's called a subsidy. It's not called a subsidy when
it goes to private wealth, that's reform or something."
Source: Talk titled "Free Market Fantasies" at Harvard University, April 13,
1996

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the
spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that
spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives
people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the
presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the
range of the debate."
Source: The Common Good, 1998

"Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba
is stable, but that's not called stability."
Source: Interview by Hugh Gusterson, November 2000

"It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of
intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The
real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and
dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."
Source: Talk titled "The World After September 11th", AFSC Conference at
Tufts University, Massachusetts, December 8, 2001

"Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate
the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve
power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a
society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda
and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the
New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so
on. But there's also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of
the rest of the population -- to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don
't interfere with decision-making. And the press that's designed for that
purpose isn't the New York Times and the Washington Post, it's sitcoms on
television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with
three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"...evidence-based approach, the U.S. negotiators argued, is interference
with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive.
[...] the claim itself is kind of amusing, I mean, even if you believe the
free market rhetoric for a moment. The main purpose of advertising is to
undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in
economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers
make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the
last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums
to prevent that, which brings us back to the viability of American
democracy. For many years, elections here, election campaigns, have been run
by the public relations industry and each time it's with increasing
sophistication. And quite naturally, the industry uses the same technique to
sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The
point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and
suppressing information, and similarly, to undermine democracy by same
method, projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information. The
candidates are trained, carefully trained, to project a certain image.
Intellectuals like to make fun of George Bush's use of phrases like
"misunderestimate," and so on, but my strong suspicion is that he's trained
to do that. He's carefully trained to efface the fact that he's a spoiled
frat boy from Yale, and to look like a Texas roughneck kind of ordinary guy
just like you, just waiting to get back to the ranch that they created for
him..."
Source: 25th anniversary of the International Relations Center in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, January 26, 2005

"The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization"
to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that
they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of
people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a
different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of
human beings, become "anti-globalist." This is simply vulgar propaganda,
like the term "anti-Soviet" used by the most disgusting commissars to refer
to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic. Take the World Social
Forum, called "anti-globalization" in the propaganda system -- which happens
to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The
WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge
numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of
life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow highly privileged
elites who meet at the competing World Economic Forum, and are called
"pro-globalization" by the propaganda system. An observer watching this
farce from Mars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the
educated classes."
Source: Interview by Snijezana Matejcic, June 2005
[edit]


=On wars, interventions, and terrorism=

"Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace.
Everybody is for peace. The question is: what kind of peace?"
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. Middle East policy, May 14, 1984

"Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another. For
example, I think about 90% of the forces that the British used to control
India were Indians. [...] It was true when the American forces conquered the
Philippines, killing a couple hundred thousand people. They were being
helped by Philippine tribes, exploiting conflicts among local groups. There
were plenty who were going to side with the conquerors. But forget the Third
World, just take a look at the Nazi conquest of nice, civilized Western
Europe, places like Belgium and Holland and France. Who was rounding up the
Jews? Local people, often. In France they were rounding them up faster than
the Nazis could handle them. The Nazis also used Jews to control Jews. If
the United States was conquered by the Russians, Ronald Reagan, George Bush,
Elliott Abrams and the rest of them would probably be working for the
invaders, sending people off to concentration camps. They're the right
personality types."
Source: Keeping the Rabble in Line, January 14, 1993 (note: Reagan's role
was edited to "would be reading their ads on TV")
"A good way of finding out who won a war, who lost a war, and what the war
was about, is to ask who's cheering and who's depressed after it's over -
this can give you interesting answers. So, for example, if you ask that
question about the Second World War, you find out that the winners were the
Nazis, the German industrialists who had supported Hitler, the Italian
Fascists and the war criminals that were sent off to South America - they
were all cheering at the end of the war. The losers of the war were the
anti-fascist resistance, who were crushed all over the world. Either they
were massacred like in Greece or South Korea, or just crushed like in Italy
and France. That's the winners and losers. That tells you partly what the
war was about. Now let's take the Cold War: Who's cheering and who's
depressed? Let's take the East first. The people who are cheering are the
former Communist Party bureaucracy who are now the capitalist entrepreneurs,
rich beyond their wildest dreams, linked to Western capital, as in the
traditional Third World model, and the new Mafia. They won the Cold War. The
people of East Europe obviously lost the Cold War; they did succeed in
overthrowing Soviet tyranny, which is a gain, but beyond that they've lost -
they're in miserable shape and declining further. If you move to the West,
who won and who lost? Well, the investors in General Motors certainly won.
They now have this new Third World open again to exploitation - and they can
use it against their own working classes. On the other hand, the workers in
GM certainly didn't win, they lost. They lost the Cold War, because now
there's another way to exploit them and oppress them and they're suffering
from it."
Source: Forum with John Pilger and Harold Pinter in Islington, London, May
1994

"Actually, on humanitarian intervention in general, I guess my view is not
unlike the view that was attributed to Gandhi, accurately or not, when he
was supposedly asked what he thought about western civilization. He is
supposed to have said that he thought it would be a good idea. Similarly,
humanitarian intervention would be a good idea, in principle. [...] can we
expect that with the existing power structure, distribution of power in the
world, there will be humanitarian intervention? There is nothing new about
the question, of course. The idea of humanitarian intervention goes back to
the days of the Concert of Europe a century ago - in the 19th Century there
was lots of talk about civilizing missions and interventions that would do
good things. The US intervened in the Philippines to "uplift and
christianize" the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of
them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same
thing happened with other countries. We cannot disregard the historical
record and talk about an ideal world. It makes sense to work towards a
better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the
real world is."
Source: Seminar at Bard College, New York, February 2, 2000

"Armies usually aren't interested in wars. They like preparation for war.
But they have an understandable reluctance to fight a war. So I think if you
look at, at least the history that I know, it's usually the civilian
leadership who is pushing the military to do something. It was the case in
the early days of the Vietnam War."
Source: Interview by Hugh Gusterson, November 2000

"We cannot say much about human affairs with any confidence, but sometimes
it is possible. We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there
will be a world without war, or there won't be a world -- at least, a world
inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering
of others."
Source: Talk titled "A World Without War" at the 2nd World Social Forum, in
Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 31, 2002

[Q: when do you think is it right to intervene in the affairs of another
nation?] "I think there are conditions under which that would be possible.
One basic condition is that nonviolent -- you mean violent intervention? --
that nonviolent means have been exhausted. That's one condition. A second
condition is that the people of the country in which you're intervening
support the intervention. Under those conditions -- and you can think of
others -- intervention would be justified. However, we don't ever apply
those conditions."
Source: Interview by Francine Stock on BBC FOUR, January 2003

[Q: can you conceive of any form in which you might support American
military action taken, like the President's justification, in anticipation
of an imminent and dangerous threat?] "Why don't you generalize it, and say,
can you conceive of any action which any state might take? Sure, you can
imagine such things. Let's say you're in Iran right now. [audience laughter]
It's under attack by the world's superpower, with embargoes... It's
surrounded by states either occupied by its superpower enemy, or having
nuclear weapons. Little way down the road is the regional superpower, which
has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and other WMDs, and is essentially an
offshore US military base. And has a bigger and more advanced air force than
any NATO power, outside the United States. And in the past year has been
supplied by the global superpower with 100 advanced jet bombers, openly
advertised as able to fly to Iran and back to bomb it. And also provided
with what the Hebrew press calls special weaponry, nobody knows what that
means, but if you're an Iranian intelligence analyst you gonna give a worst
case analysis, of course. And has actually been publicly provided with smart
bombs, and deep penetration weapons... They have a terrific justification
for anticipatory self defense, better than any other case I can think of.
But would I approve of their bombing Israel, or carrying out terrorist acts
in Washington? No, even though they have a pretty strong case, better than
anything I can think of here. Just as the Japanese had a much better case
than any that I can think of here, but I don't approve of Pearl Harbor. So
yeah, we can conceive of cases, and in fact some of them are right in front
of our eyes, but none of us approve of them. None of us. So if we don't
approve of them in real cases, why discuss hypothetical cases that don't
exist? We can do that in some philosophy seminar, but in the real world
there're real cases that ought to concern us."
Source: Talk at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York.
November 16, 2004
[edit]


=World War II=

"Yet to enter approved memory is the "finale" described in the official Air
Force history, a 1000-plane raid on civilian targets organized by General
"Hap" Arnold to celebrate the war's end, five days after Nagasaki. According
to survivors, leaflets were dropped among the bombs announcing the
surrender."
Source: Z Magazine, July 1995
[edit]


=Vietnam War=

"The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men,
including all of us who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury
and destruction - all of us who would have remained silent had stability and
order been secured."
Source: American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969

"What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city
can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter
at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one
say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to
weep for this country."
Source: American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969

"It goes back to the days when we were defending ourselves against the
internal aggression of the Native American population, who we incidently
wiped out in the process. In the post World War II period, we've frequently
had to carry out defense against internal aggression, that is against
Salvadorans in El Salvador, Greeks in Greece, against Filipinos in the
Philippines, against South Vietnamese in South Vietnam, and many other
places. And the concept of internal aggression has been repeatedly invoked
in this connection, and quite appropriately. It's an interesting concept,
it's one that George Orwell would certainly have admired, and it's
elaborated in many ways in the internal documentary record."
Source: Talk titled "The Lessons of Vietnam", March 31, 1985

"The Tet Offensive in January of 1968 [...] made the war unpopular. American
corporate elites decided at that point that it just wasn't worth it, it was
too costly, let's pull out. So at that time everybody became an opponent of
the war because the orders from on high were that you were supposed to be
opposed to it. And after that every single memoirist radically changed their
story about what had happened. They all concocted this story that their
hero, John F. Kennedy, was really planning to pull out of this unpopular war
before he was killed and then Johnson changed it. If you look at the earlier
memoirs, not a hint, I mean literally."
Source: Interview by David Cogswell, September 14, 1993 (see also:
Rethinking Camelot, Boston Review)

"Reactions to our adversity are not entirely uniform. At the dovish extreme,
we find Senator John Kerry, who warns that we should never again fight a war
"without committing enough resources to win"; no other flaw is mentioned.
And there is President Carter, the noted moral teacher and human rights
apostle, who assured us that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no
responsibility to render it any assistance because "the destruction was
mutual," an observation so uncontroversial as to pass with no reaction.
[...] Properly statesmanlike, President Bush announces that "It was a bitter
conflict, but Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat
of retribution for the past." Their crimes against us can never be
forgotten, but "we can begin writing the last chapter of the Vietnam war" if
they dedicate themselves with sufficient zeal to the MIAs. We might even
"begin helping the Vietnamese find and identify their own combatants missing
in action," [New York Times Asia correspondent] Crossette reports. The
adjacent front-page story reports Japan's failure, once again, to
"unambiguously" accept the blame "for its wartime aggression.""
Source: Year 501, 1993

"The doves are pleased that [Robert McNamara] finally concedes that "our
blundering efforts to do good" turned into a "dangerous mistake," as Anthony
Lewis put the matter long after corporate America had determined that the
game was not worth the candle. As the doves had by then come to recognize,
although we had pursued aims that were "noble" and "motivated by the
loftiest intentions," they were nevertheless "illusory" and it ended up as a
"failed crusade" (Stanley Karnow). McNamara has now "paid his debt,"
Theodore Draper writes in the New York Review, finally recognizing that "The
Vietnam War peculiarly demanded a hardheaded assessment of what it was worth
in the national interest of the United States," just as the invasion of
Afghanistan "peculiarly demanded" such an assessment in the Kremlin. Draper
is outraged by the "vitriolic and protracted campaign" against McNamara by
the New York Times. "The case against McNamara largely hinges on the premise
that he did not express his doubts" about "whether American troops should
continue to die" early on, but the Times did not either (though Draper did,
he proudly reminds us). Could there be another question?"
Source: Z Magazine, July 1995

"The criticisms were so tepid they were embarrassing. Almost nobody,
including me, dared to criticize the U.S. attack on South Vietnam. That's
like talking Hittite. Nobody even understood the words."
Source: Class Warfare, 1995

"Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor farmers, are
killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the scene of the heaviest
bombing of civilian targets in history it appears, and arguably the most
cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant society had little to
do with its wars in the region. The worst period was from 1968, when
Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations (under popular and
business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam.
Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos and
Cambodia. The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far
worse than land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and maim, and
have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was saturated with
hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a
failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell.
The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality control or a rational
policy of murdering civilians by delayed action. These were only a fraction
of the technology deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves
where families sought shelter. Current annual casualties from "bombies" are
estimated from hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide casualty rate of
20,000," more than half of them deaths, according to the veteran Asia
reporter Barry Wain of the Wall Street Journal -- in its Asia edition. A
conservative estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is approximately
comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly concentrated among
children -- over half, according to analyses reported by the Mennonite
Central Committee, which has been working there since 1977 to alleviate the
continuing atrocities. There have been efforts to publicize and deal with
the humanitarian catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is
trying to remove the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing
from the handful of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the
British press reports, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian
civilians. The British press also reports, with some anger, the allegation
of MAG specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render harmless
procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a lot safer."
These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in the United States.
The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in Cambodia, particularly
the Eastern region where US bombardment from early 1969 was most intense."
Source: ZNet, March 1999

"The most important victory, in fact, was in Indonesia. In 1965 there was a
military coup, which instantly carried out a Rwanda-style slaughter, and
it's not an exaggeration. Rwanda-style slaughter, which wiped out the only
mass-based political organization, killed mostly landless peasants, and
instituted a brutal and murderous regime. There was total euphoria in the
United States. So happy, they couldn't contain it. When you read the press,
it was just ecstatic. It's kind of suppressed now because it doesn't look
pretty in retrospect, but it was understood. Years later, McGeorge Bundy,
who was the national security advisor, recognized that, he said, and I think
he's right, the U.S. should have stopped the war in Vietnam in 1965, because
we basically won. By 1965 South Vietnam was largely destroyed, most of the
rest was gonna quickly be destroyed, and we had saved the major prize,
Indonesia. The rot wasn't gonna spread to Indonesia after this delightful
Rwanda-style slaughter."
Source: Teach-in on the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, in
New York, April 2000
[edit]


=Gulf War=

"Strikingly, no concern was voiced over the glaringly obvious fact that no
official reason was ever offered for going to war -- no reason, that is,
that could not be instantly refuted by a literate teenager."
Source: Z Magazine, May 1991

"The crisis began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a year ago. There was
some fighting, leaving hundreds killed according to Human Rights groups.
That hardly qualifies as war. Rather, in terms of crimes against peace and
against humanity, it falls roughly into the category of the Turkish invasion
of northern Cyprus, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1978, and the U.S.
invasion of Panama. In these terms it falls well short of Israel's 1982
invasion of Lebanon, and cannot remotely be compared with the near-genocidal
Indonesian invasion and annexation of East Timor, to mention only two cases
of aggression that are still in progress, with continuing atrocities and
with the crucial support of those who most passionately professed their
outrage over Iraq's aggression. During the subsequent months, Iraq was
responsible for terrible crimes in Kuwait, with several thousand killed and
many tortured. But that is not war; rather, state terrorism, of the kind
familiar among U.S. clients. The second phase of the conflict began with the
U.S.-U.K. attack of January 15 (with marginal participation of others). This
was slaughter, not war."
Source: Z Magazine, August 31, 1991
[edit]


=1992 intervention in Somalia=

Regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of
Mogadishu: [Q: what did the United States have to gain by intervening in
Somalia?] "In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they
told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as
the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine.
His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about
raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look
like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the
Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years,
the United State had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just
devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out,
it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation
and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to,
certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it
was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were
beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their
supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was
finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush
announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on
television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in
humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical,
that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the
reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of
December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going
on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy
new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the
television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the
Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were
all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the
Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So
they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so
they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media
could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty
accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get
some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to
starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple
of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get
unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell
Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of
the reasons why the U.S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping
operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty.
U.S. military doctrine is that U.S. soldiers are not permitted to come under
any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say,
Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under
threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are
being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of
casualties, and they don't like it. But U.S. soldiers are not permitted to
come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at
them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a
massacre. According to the U.S., I don't know the actual numbers, but
according to U.S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were
killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex
de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and
relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of
people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention
was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given
as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention."
Source: Talk titled "Sovereignty and World Order" at Kansas State
University, September 20, 1999
[edit]


=Kosovo War=

"Let me just put the whole thing in a kind of mundane level. Like, suppose
you walk out in the street, this evening, and you see a crime being
committed, you know, somebody is robbing someone else. Well, you have three
choices. One choice is to try to stop it, maybe you call 911 or something.
Another choice is to do nothing. A third choice is to pick up an assault
rifle and kill 'em both, and kill a bystander at the same time. Well,
suppose you do that, and somebody says, "Well, you know, why did you do
that?" And you say, "Look, I couldn't stand by and do nothing." I mean, is
that a response? If you can think of nothing that wouldn't do harm, then do
nothing. And the same is true, magnified, in international affairs. Apart
from the fact that there were things that could have been done."
Source: Panel with Edward Said at Columbia University, New York, April 1999

"The United States is not going in there to save the oppressed. If we wanted
to save the oppressed we could have supported the nonviolent movement
instead of selling them out at Dayton. Any kind of turbulence in the Balkans
is a threat to the interests of rich, privileged, powerful people.
Therefore, any turbulence in the Balkans is called a crisis. The same
circumstances would not be a crisis were they to occur in Sierra Leone, or
Central America, or even Turkey. But in Europe, the heartland of American
economic interests, any threat in the Balkans has the possibility of
spilling over."
Source: Interview by Michael Lerner in Tikkun, April 5, 1999

"...the argument is that by bombing at a time when most of the atrocities
were attributed to the KLA guerrillas, with the anticipation that the
bombing would lead to far worse atrocities, NATO was preventing atrocities.
The fact that this is the strongest argument that can be contrived by
serious analysts, and I stress serious because there's plenty of nonsense,
that tells us a good deal about the decision to bomb, particularly when we
recall that there apparently were diplomatic options."
Source: Talk titled "Illegal but Legitimate: A Dubious Doctrine for the
Times" at the University of Washington, April 20, 2005

"We might add now that we do have an authoritative account of why the United
States bombed Serbia in 1999. It comes from Strobe Talbott, now the director
of the Brookings Institution, but in 1999 he was in charge of the State
Department-Pentagon team that supervised the diplomacy in the affair. He
wrote the introduction to a recent book by his Director of Communications,
John Norris, which presents the position of the Clinton administration at
the time of the bombing. Norris writes that "it was Yugoslavia's resistance
to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of
Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war". In brief, they were
resisting absorption into the U.S. dominated international socioeconomic
system. Talbott adds that thanks to John Norris, anyone interested in the
war in Kosovo "will know ... how events looked and felt at the time to those
of us who were involved" in the war, actually directing it. This
authoretative explanation will come as no surprise at all to students of
international affairs who are more interested in fact than rhetoric. And it
will also come as no surprise, to those familiar with intellectual life,
that the attack continues to be hailed as a grand achievement of
humanitarian intervention, despite massive Western documentation to the
contrary, and now an explicit denial at the highest level; which will change
nothing, it's not the way intellectual life works."
Source: Talk at the Englert Theatre in Iowa, April 10, 2006

"...obviously the Serbs had contingency plans, as every sane person knew.
The US has contingency plans to invade Canada. Israel has contingency plans
to expel Palestinians, and few sane people doubt that they would carry them
out if under attack. That's what military planners do for a living. [...] In
that book I reviewed the kind of material selected from the OSCE report by
the Irish TV announcer, but also reviewed the material that would have been
selected by his exact counterpart in Belgrade, and the full conclusions."
Source: ZNet forum reply, April 24, 2006
[edit]


=September 11, 2001 attacks=

"The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of
victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's
bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its
pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no
one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to
pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But
that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims, as
usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is
likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and
oppressed people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with
many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal
freedom."
Source: A Quick Reaction, September 12, 2001

"It was a historic event. Not unfortunately because of its scale. Unpleasant
to think about, but in terms of the scale it's not that unusual. I did say
it's the worst, probably the worst instant human toll of any crime. And that
may be true. But there are terrorist crimes with effects a bit more drawn
out that are more extreme, unfortunately. Nevertheless, it's a historic
event because there was a change. The change was the direction in which the
guns were pointing. That's new. Radically new."
Source: Talk titled "The New War Against Terror" at MIT, October 18, 2001

"Right after September 11, the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick,
said the first thing that had to be done to combat terrorism was to pass
fast-track. Now that should really make Osama bin Laden tremble in his
boots - that the President has Kremlin-style authority to sign economic
agreements."
Source: Interview by V. K. Ramachandran in Frontline, November 11, 2001

"Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think
of the United States as an "innocent victim" only if we adopt the convenient
path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which
are, after all, hardly a secret."
Source: 9-11, 2001

"Moral equivalence is a term of propaganda that was invented to try to
prevent us from looking at the acts for which we are responsible. [...]
There is no such notion. There are many different dimensions and criteria.
For example, there's no moral equivalence between the bombing of the World
Trade Center and the destruction of Nicaragua or of El Salvador, of
Guatemala. The latter were far worse, by any criterion. So there's no moral
equivalence."
Source: Interview by Tim Sebastian on BBC NEWS, February 2, 2002

"The Americans didn't even think about the outcome of the bombing, because
the Sudanese were so far below contempt as to be not worth thinking about.
Suppose I walk down the sidewalk in Cambridge and, without a second thought,
step on an ant. That would mean that I regard the ant as beneath contempt,
and that's morally worse than if I purposely killed that ant."
Source: Interview by Michael Powell in the Washington Post, May 5, 2002

"September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better
pay much closer attention to what the US government does in the world and
how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were
not on the agenda before. That's all to the good. It is also the merest
sanity, if we hope to reduce the likelihood of future atrocities. It may be
comforting to pretend that our enemies "hate our freedoms," as President
Bush stated, but it is hardly wise to ignore the real world, which conveys
different lessons. The president is not the first to ask: "Why do they hate
us?" In a staff discussion 44 years ago, President Eisenhower described "the
campaign of hatred against us [in the Arab world], not by the governments
but by the people". His National Security Council outlined the basic
reasons: the US supports corrupt and oppressive governments and is "opposing
political or economic progress" because of its interest in controlling the
oil resources of the region."
Source: The Guardian, September 9, 2002

"After September 11th I had tons of interviews everywhere, except the United
States of course, and often it was national radio and TV. A couple of times
it turned out to be Irish television and BBC back to back, and the
difference in reaction was startling. If I said this much on Irish TV, OK,
discussion over, everyone understands what I'm talking about. You try to say
it on BBC, you have to go on for like about an hour to explain to them what
you mean. The Irish sea is a chasm, and it just depends who's been holding
the whip for 800 years and who's been under it for 800 years."
Source: In Noam Chomsky - Rebel Without a Pause, 2003

Regarding 9/11 conspiracy theories: "Even if it were true, which is
extremely unlikely, who cares? It doesn't have any significance. It's a
little bit like the huge energy that's put out on trying to figure out who
killed John F. Kennedy. Who knows? And who cares? Plenty of people get
killed all the time, why does it matter that one of them happened to be John
F. Kennedy? If there was some reason to believe that there was a high level
conspiracy, it might be interesting. But the evidence against that is just
overwhelming. And after that, if it happened to be a jealous husband, or the
mafia, or someone else, what difference does it make? It's just taking
energy away from serious issues onto ones that don't matter. And I think the
same is true here; it's my personal opinion."
Source: Q&A at the Kossuth Club, in Budapest, Hungary, May 16, 2004

"Such attacks are morally outrageous and politically imbecilic. They are the
best gift one can give to the most hardline and brutal elements -- exactly
as happened, exactly as was predictable."
Source: ZNet forum reply, February 5, 2005 (context: Ward Churchill)
[edit]


=U.S. invasion of Afghanistan=

"Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against
terrorism."
Source: 9-11, 2001

"What will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs
implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several
million people in the next couple of weeks. Very casually, with no comment,
no particular thought about it, that's just kind of normal, here, and in a
good part of Europe."
Source: Talk titled "The New War Against Terror" at MIT, October 18, 2001
(further details: 2001, 2005)

"Let us turn now to the most elementary principle of just war theory,
universality. Those who cannot accept this principle should have the decency
to keep silent about matters of right and wrong, or just war. If we can rise
to this level, some obvious questions arise: for example, have Cuba and
Nicaragua been entitled to set off bombs in Washington, New York, and Miami
in self-defense against ongoing terrorist attack? Particularly so when the
perpetrators are well known and act with complete impunity, sometimes in
brazen defiance of the highest international authorities, so that the cases
are far clearer than Afghanistan? If not, why not?"
Source: Hegemony or Survival, 2003
[edit]


=2003 invasion of Iraq=

"We certainly shouldn't trust to deal with [Saddam Hussein] anyone who
supported him through his worst crimes, that's insane."
Source: Talk at the University of Houston, Texas, October 18, 2002

[Q: isn't there a certain calculus that someone who is sitting in the shoes
of a Condoleezza Rice can make, that they're responsible for the best
outcome for American citizens, and there's an upside of going into Iraq
which is we get one of the greatest material possessions in world's history,
and there're downsides which are: we upset the international community, and
maybe there's more terrorism. Couldn't you envision a calculus where they
say, sure, that's the reason, and it's a good reason, let's do it. What's
the flaw in the calculus?] "Oh, I think that's exactly their calculus. But
then we ought to just be honest and say, "Look, we're a bunch of Nazis." So
fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can
throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come
out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want
because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American
citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of
domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual
dedication..."
Source: Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002

"To gain control over this resource, and have probably military bases there,
is a tremendous achievement for world control. You read counter-arguments to
this, and they're worth looking at. So it's argued that it can't be true,
because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be greater than the profits
that will be made. Well, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but it's totally
irrelevant. And the reason is because the costs of reconstruction are gonna
be paid by the taxpayer, by you, and the profits are gonna go right into the
pockets of the energy corporations. So yeah, it doesn't matter how they
balance out, it's just another taxpayer subsidy to the rich."
Source: KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 5, 2003

"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations
that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in
both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to
rebuild it."
Source: Interview by David Barsamian on Alternative Radio, September 11,
2003

"In September [2002] the government announced the national security
strategy. That is not completely without precedent, but it is quite new as a
formulation of state policy. What is stated is that we are tearing the
entire system of the international law to shreds, the end of UN charter, and
that we are going to carry out an aggressive war - which we will call
"preventive" - and at any time we choose, and that we will rule the world by
force. In addition, we will assure that there is never any challenge to our
domination because we are so overwhelmingly powerful in military force that
we will simply crush any potential challenge. That caused shudders around
the world, including the foreign policy elite at home which was appalled by
this. It is not that things like that haven't been heard in the past. Of
course they had, but it had never been formulated as an official national
policy. I suspect you will have to go back to Hitler to find an analogy to
that. Now, when you propose new norms in the international behavior and new
policies you have to illustrate it, you have to get people to understand
that you mean it. Also you have to have what a Harvard historian called an
"exemplary war", a war of example, which shows that we really mean what we
say. And we have to choose the right target. The target has to have several
properties. First it has to be completely defenseless. No one would attack
anybody who might be able to defend themselves, that would be not prudent.
Iraq meets that perfectly... And secondly, it has to be important. So there
will be no point invading Burundi, for example. It has to be a country
worthwhile controlling, owning, and Iraq has that property too."
Source: Interview by Atilio Borón, Argentina, June 14, 2003

"I think that the polls taken in Baghdad explain it very well, they seem to
understand. The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the
major sources of the world's energy, right in the heart of the world's
energy producing regions. To create, if they can, a dependent client state.
To have permanent military bases. And to gain what's called "critical
leverage" - I'm quoting Zbigniew Brzezinski - to gain critical leverage over
rivals, the European and Asian economies. It's been understood since the
Second World War, that if you have your hand on that spigot, the main source
of the world's energy, you have what early planners called "veto power" over
others. Iraq is also the last part of the world where there are vast,
untapped, easily accessible energy resources. And you can be sure that they
want the profits from that to go primarily to U.S.-based multinationals and
back to the U.S. Treasury, not to rivals. There are plenty of reasons for
invading Iraq."
Source: Interview by Bill Maher on HBO, November 10, 2004

"It's certainly true that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein,
and also without the people who supported him through his worst atrocities,
and are now telling us about them."
Source: Interview by Bill Maher on HBO, November 10, 2004

"The big debate in Washington is totally pointless. And the media, about
whether Bush downgraded terror in order to invade Iraq. There's nothing to
debate. He invaded Iraq. That proves beyond doubt that he downgraded the
threat of terror in favor of invading Iraq. They anticipated, and their own
intelligence agencies told them, and everyone else did too, that invasion of
Iraq was likely to increase the threat of terror. It's not a high priority,
so they invaded Iraq because that's much higher priority." Source: Talk at
the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York. November 16, 2004

"The crucial question for us is not whether they have a theocratic
government. I'd personally prefer not, but I can think of a lot of places
where I'd prefer not, like here. But, the question is whether the US will
agree to let Iraq alone. That means to make it very clean and explicit, both
in word and in action, that the US will withdraw, set a timetable for it,
will not influence what goes on in Iraq, will not leave military bases, will
let the country go off on its own. I think we also ought to pay massive
reparations, but I'll stop short of that. Those are the crucial issues. It's
not up to Rumsfeld what kind of government they have, it's up to him to get
out."
Source: Interview by Doug Henwood on WBAI, February 10, 2005

"I think murdering Iraqi union leaders is criminal, for example. And a lot
of what the insurgents have done is criminal. But, you know, you rank the
priorities. Our priority is to stop major war crimes, like Fallujah for
example. So yeah, what the resistance is doing, one can also criticize,
harshly in fact. But in any kind of ranking, even if we're on Mars, and
certainly if we're in the United States, what vastly more important is our
own crimes, which are much worse, and they're ours."
Source: Interview by Doug Henwood on WBAI, February 10, 2005

"After the invasion, there was sophisticated massive looting of the
installations that were constructed in the 1980s - that includes
high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear and chemical
weapons and missiles, and also toxins for biological weapons. Prior to the
US-British invasion, these sites had been monitored by UN inspectors, but
they were quickly kicked out of the country and have not been back since,
while the occupation forces left the sites unguarded, and very sophisticated
looting operations took place. Where this huge massive equipment has gone no
one knows, and it's uncomfortable to guess. The ironies are almost
inexpressible. The US and Britain invaded to prevent the use of WMDs that
did not exist, and they succeeded in providing the terrorists that they had
mobilized with the means to develop WMDs that the US and Britain had
provided to Saddam Hussein."
Source: Talk titled "Illegal but Legitimate: A Dubious Doctrine for the
Times" at the University of Washington, April 20, 2005

"The US-UK would, doubtless, be as eager to draw their troops down in Iraq
as Hitler was in occupied France and Norway, and the Russians were in
Eastern Europe. And on the same condition. That local authorities will be
able to ensure order and obedience to the master."
Source: ZNet forum reply, July 22, 2005

"It should have been the easiest invasion in history, and the incompetence
and arrogance of the Pentagon planners turned it into a total catastrophe.
So yes, it hasn't worked out the way they wanted, but that has nothing to do
with their plans. It would be like saying that Hitler didn't indend to
conquer the world because he failed. They actually succeeded in creating an
insurgency, which didn't exist, there was no basis for it and no outside
support. In fact, the U.S. and Britain were compelled to allow elections.
The elections in Iraq are a triumph of mass popular nonviolent resistance.
Washington and London tried in every way they could to evade elections. You
go back through 2003, there was one after another scheme proposed, to try to
avoid elections. But they couldn't do it, there were mass demonstartions,
partially led by Ayatollah Sistani. Finally they had to back down, and allow
elections. Now they're trying in every way to subvert them."
Source: Interview by George Arney on BBC World Service, January 2, 2006

"If the country had been flooded with several 100,000 troops, as Shinseki
adviced, and if the orders had not been so grotesque (stand by quietly while
the cultural wealth of Iraq, and humanity, was destroyed in a way
reminiscent of the Mongol invasion; treat the population with contempt and
brutality; allow the society to reconstruct instead of imposing
ultra-liberal measures bound to destroy it, etc.), then the place might have
been pacified as well as northern Europe was under the Nazis -- or the
Philippines, after a decade of extreme brutality, victory having been
declared repeatedly during those years. Just how one judges such an outcome
depends on other choices."
Source: ZNet forum reply, April 24, 2006
[edit]


=On war crimes=

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president
would have been hanged."
Source: Talk at St. Michael's College, Vermont, around 1990

"On May 27, the New York Times published one of the most incredible
sentences I've ever seen. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger
interchanges. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to
prevent it, but the courts permitted it. You read through it, and you see
the following statement embedded in it. Nixon at one point informs
Kissinger, his right-hand Eichmann, that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And
Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out "a
massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that
moves." That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other
people do it that I've ever seen in the historical record. Right at this
moment there is a prosecution of Milosevic going on in the international
tribunal, and the prosecutors are kind of hampered because they can't find
direct orders, or a direct connection even, linking Milosevic to any
atrocities on the ground. Suppose they found a statement like this. Suppose
a document came out from Milosevic saying, "Reduce Kosovo to rubble.
Anything that flies on anything that moves." They would be overjoyed. The
trial would be over. He would be sent away for multiple life sentences - if
it was a U.S. trial, immediately the electric chair."
Source: Interview by David Barsamian on Alternative Radio, June 11, 2004

"Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think
that that was what they were doing - nor does Bush. You know, they were
defending justice and democracy from greater evils. And in fact I think
you'd find it hard to discover a mass murderer in history who didn't think
that-"
Source: Interview by Wallace Shawn, October 19, 2004
[edit]


=On a military draft=

"I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact,
I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is
because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off. So I
was very much involved in the resistance, but I was never against the draft.
I disagreed with a lot of my friends and associates on that, for a very good
reason, I think at least, as nobody seems to agree. In my view, if there's
going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizens' army. Now, here I do
agree with some people, the top brass, they don't want a citizens' army.
They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army
of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam War, the U.S. military
realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I
think ever in the history of European imperialism, including us, they had
used a citizens' army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and
civilians just cannot do that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French
Foreign Legion, the Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has
used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking, like
England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and
send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run
imperial wars. They're just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians
are not going to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army
started falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was
because the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were
not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officers. The
whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And that's why I think
that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I'm in favor of it. If
there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars... it
ought to be a citizens' army so that the attitudes of the society are
reflected in the military."
Source: 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New
Jersey, November 14, 2004

"My feeling then, and now, is that IF there is to be an army, then the
burden of service should be shared, not assigned to the disadvantaged by one
or another means, as in the case of all onerous tasks. That does not imply
that those called upon to share the burden should necessarily agree. There
are always cases where refusal is justified, and refusal to serve in Vietnam
was, in my opinion, one such case. Same always. Garbage collection should be
shared, not assigned to the disadvantaged, but if someone is ordered to dump
toxic wastes in a schoolyard, he or she should refuse."
Source: ZNet forum reply, February 3, 2005
[edit]


=On countries=

"...roughly speaking, states are violent to the extent that they have the
power to act in the interests of those with domestic power..."
Source: In C. P. Otero (ed.), Language and Politics, June 13, 1983

"States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including
ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually
violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's
roughly accurate."
Source: In Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

"Independent nationalism is unacceptable to the West, no matter where it is,
and it has to be driven back into subordination. In the case of Grenada, you
can do it in a weekend; in the case of the Soviet Union it may take 70
years. But these are matters of scale, the logic is essentially the same."
Source: Forum with John Pilger and Harold Pinter in Islington, London, May
1994

"If, say, you say that Iran is a terrorist state, you don't need evidence.
If you say that the US is a terrorist state, you need plenty. Here, that is.
In Iran it's reversed."
Source: ZNet forum reply, December 18, 2005


=Canada=

"For example, take Suharto's Indonesia, which is a brutal, murderous state.
I think Canada was supporting it all the way through, because it was making
money out of the situation. And we can go around the world. Canada strongly
supported the US invasion of South Vietnam, the whole of Indochina. In fact
Canada became the per capita largest war exporter, trying to make as much
money as it could from the murder of people in Indochina. In fact, I'd
suggest that you look back at the comment by a well known and respected
Canadian diplomat, I think his name was John Hughes, some years ago, who
defined what he called the Canadian idea, namely "we uphold our principles
but we find a way around them". Well, that's pretty accurate. And Canada is
not unique in this respect, maybe a little more hypocritical."
Source: Interview by Mary Lou Finlay on CBC radio, April 16, 1999 (further
details: Justin Podur, Noam Chomsky)


=Cuba=

"Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism than the
rest of the world combined and, therefore, in the American ideological
system it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as
Orwell would have predicted."
Source: Talk titled "American Foreign Policy" at Harvard University, March
19, 1985


=France=

"In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion --
a minimal respect for facts and logic -- has been virtually abandoned."
Source: In C. P. Otero (ed.), Language and Politics, October 26, 1981

"There are significant strategic interests [in Oceania], and there's a lot
of stuff going on that's important. Not just the United States. For example,
France is doing some really vicious things there, in fact they're just
wiping out islands because they want them for nuclear tests. And when the
socialist government in France is asked, "Why to do this?", they say, "Well
look, we have to have nuclear tests." Well, if you have to have nuclear
tests, why not have them in southern France? [audience laughter] Why have
them in some island in the Pacific? Well, the answer to that is clear, after
all they're just a bunch of little brown people or something. But you can't
say that exactly, especially if you're a socialist, so something else is
said."
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on the massacres in Indonesia and East Timor,
1982

"[Common people] have to be subordinated so you have make things look
mysterious and complicated. That's the test of the intellectual. It's also
good for them: then you're an important person, talking big words which
nobody can understand. Sometimes it gets kind of comical, say in post-modern
discourse. Especially around Paris, it has become a comic strip, I mean it's
all gibberish... they try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning
behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There's
nothing there."
Source: In Chomsky on Anarchism, 2005


=Israel=

"In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the
fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical
injustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this is
recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin."
Source: Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood,
1974

"Israel is an embattled country. They rely very heavily on U.S. support. So
they have developed a very sophisticated system of propaganda. They don't
call it propaganda. They call it hasbarah. It is the only country I know of
in the world that refers to propaganda as explanation. The Ministry of
Propaganda is the Ministry of Explanation. The idea being that our position
on everything is so obviously correct that if we only explain it to people,
they will see that it is right."
Source: Interview by Burton Levine in Shmate: A Journal of Progressive
Jewish Thought, May 1988

"The Oslo agreements did represent a shift in U.S.-Israeli policy. Both
states had by then come to recognize that it is a mistake to use the Israel
Defense Forces to run the territories. It is much wiser to resort to the
traditional colonial pattern of relying on local clients to control the
subject population, in the manner of the British in India, South Africa
under apartheid, the U.S. in Central America, and other classic cases. That
is the assigned role of the Palestinian Authority, which like its
predecessors, has to follow a delicate path: it must maintain some
credibility among the population, while serving as a second oppressor, both
militarily and economically, in coordination with the primary power centers
that retain ultimate control. The long-term goal of the Oslo process was
described accurately by Shlomo Ben-Ami shortly before he joined the Barak
government: it is to establish a condition of permanent neo-colonialist
dependency. The mechanisms have been spelled out explicitly in the
successive interim agreements; and more important, implemented on the
ground."
Source: Interview by Yitzhak Laor in Haaretz, December 29, 2000

[Q: Zionism=racism?] "It's necessary, first of all, to distinguish between
Zionism and the practices of the State of Israel. The practices are
undoubtedly racist. As for Zionism as such, a more accurate charge would be
that it was colonialist, in some ways the last episode of old-fashioned
European colonialism. But even that somewhat overstates, because the
ideology covered a lot of ground, as nationalist ideologies commonly do. And
in this case, as in all, there are particularities to consider. That aside,
the condemnation of the policies of Israel as racist, while correct, reeks
of hypocrisy. Simply look at the practices of those who are issuing the
charges."
Source: ZNet forum reply, August 20, 2001

"[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law
and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized,
even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral
responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N.
ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation
of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring
specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of
the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an
occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to
acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as
its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention."
[...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between
official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by
late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement
the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001],
there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland,
on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible
for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European
Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these
days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the
parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which
condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged
Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches,"
including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving
of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and
appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried
out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's
a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of
the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is
obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the
perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own
leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of
grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's
worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the
conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right
after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in
Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [..] and that has the usual
consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media."
Source: Talk titled "On West Asia" at UC Berkeley, March 21, 2002

[Q: do you think the Palestinian suicide bombers are freedom fighters or
terrorists?] "They're terrorists - they're both, actually. They're trying to
fight for freedom, but doing it in a totally unacceptable immoral way. Of
course they're terrorists. And there's been Palestinian terrorism all the
way through. I have always opposed it, I oppose it now. But it's very small
as compared with the US-backed Israeli terrorism. Quite typically, violence
reflects the means of violence. It's not unusual. State terror is almost
always much more extreme than retail terror, and this is no exception."
Source: Interview by Tony Jones on Lateline, April 8, 2002

"Before there were any suicide bombers, it was also reported by the same
sources that Saddam Hussein was giving $10,000 to the families of anyone who
was killed by Israeli atrocities, and there were plenty of them. Well,
should he've been doing that? So let's take the first month of the current
intifada. I'm just relying now on IDF sources. What they say is, that in the
first few days of the intifada, the Israeli army fired a million bullets.
One of the high military officers said 'that means one bullet for every
child'. Within the first month of the intifada, they killed about 70 people.
Using U.S. helicopters, and in fact Clinton shipped new helicopters to
Israel as soon as they started using them against civilians. That's just the
first month. And it goes on, no suicide bombers. At the time, it was
reported that Saddam Hussein was giving $10,000 to every family. Well, is
that supporting terror? It seems to me, sending helicopters to Israel when
they're using them to attack apartment complexes, that's supporting terror."
Source: Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002

"The US and Israel have demanded further that Palestinians not only
recognize Israel's rights as a state in the international system, but that
they also recognize Israel's abstract "right to exist," a concept that has
no place in international law or diplomacy, and a right claimed by no one.
In effect, the US and Israel are demanding that Palestinians not only
recognize Israel in the normal fashion of interstate relations, but also
formally accept the legitimacy of their expulsion from their own land. They
cannot be expected to accept that, just as Mexico does not grant the US the
"right to exist" on half of Mexico's territory, gained by conquest."
Source: Interview by Sabahattin Atas, circa September 2003 (see also:
Necessary Illusions)

"The whole question of recognizing the right of a state to exist was
invented solely for Israel. People, on the other hand, have a right to
exist. So the people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have
a right to live in security and peace."
Source: Interview by Ahmed Nassef, April 29, 2004

"On the moral implications, the plans were reported on Feb. 14 in the
front-page lead story in the New York Times. Two days earlier, the Times
published a blistering review of Osama bin Laden's "morally outrageous"
pronouncements, which reached the ultimate depth of depravity in 2002, with
a message that put forth "the perverse claim that since the United States is
a democracy, all citizens bear responsibility for its government's actions,
and civilians are therefore fair targets." The reviewer, law professor Noah
Feldman, is correct in describing this as ultimate depravity. The Feb. 14
story, and subsequent ones, have provided details on how the US and Israel
have adopted Osama's "perverse claim," descending to ultimate depravity, and
are proceeding to implement it. The announced plans are intended to impose
suffering and starvation on Palestinian civilians because they voted the
wrong way, and to ensure that others do not come to their relief (the goal
of a trip to the Middle East by Condoleezza Rice, according to the Times).
We may also note that this is nothing new. Osama's "perverse claim" has been
official US policy for at least 45 years, often formulated in virtually his
words."
Source: ZNet forum reply, February 20, 2006


=Syria=

"There's nothing nice that you can say about any of [the Arab countries].
Syria, for example, is one of the most violent terrorist regimes in the
world. But it doesn't happen to be aggressive. Maybe it would like to be,
but it isn't. For objective reasons. There's virtually no correlation
between the internal nature of some country and its commitment to external
violence. And I think if you look back over history you'll never find a
correlation, back to the Greeks."
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. Middle East policy, May 14, 1984
[edit]


=United States=

"There have been times, however, when US officials have described what's
going on in relatively frank terms; sometimes quite clearly. One put the
matter in these words: "The Central American area down to and including the
Isthmus of Panama constitutes a legitimate sphere of influence for the
United States [...] We do control the destinies of Central America and we do
so for the simple reason that the national interest absolutely dictates such
a course [...] We must decide whether we shall tolerate the interference of
any other power in Central American affairs, or insist upon our own dominant
position [...] Until now, Central America has always understood that
governments that we recognize and support stay in power, while those we do
not recognize and support fall [...] Nicaragua has become a test case, it is
difficult to see how we can afford to be defeated." That's fairly familiar.
These remarks were made by Under Secretary of State Robert Olds in 1927, and
the outside power that he was concerned about was Mexico. [audience
laughter] Mexico at that time was a Russian proxy. We were no longer
fighting Huns in the Dominican Republic, now we were fighting Russians in
Nicaragua, and in particular the Russian proxy Mexico. Mexico was then a
proxy of the Bolsheviks, so the Marines had to be sent in, once again, and
they established Somoza, and established the National Guard which was the
basis for American power throughout the region, and in fact one of the most
effective murder-incorporated forces down there for many years. They killed
Sandino, he was killed off by stealth couple of years later, the guerilla
leader. As President Coolidge sent the Marines in, he made the following
declaration: "Mexico is on trial before the world." Mexico is on trial
before the world as a proxy of the Soviet Union when we send the Marines
into Nicaragua. Now things have changed a little bit, now it's Nicaragua
that's threatening Mexico as a Russian proxy... But again there's the same
conclusion, you know, kill the spics and the ******s and so on. That follows
no matter who's the proxy for who. And all of this is repeated at every
moment of history with great seriousness and awe and so on as if it had some
meaning, as if it wasn't just some black comedy."
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, May
14, 1984

"...immediately after the 1954 Geneva Accords on a peaceful settlement for
Indochina, which Washington refused to accept, the National Security Council
secretly decreed that even in the case of "local Communist subversion or
rebellion NOT CONSTITUTING ARMED ATTACK" (my emphasis) the US would consider
the use of military force, including an attack on China if it is "determined
to be the source" of the "subversion"; the NSC also called for converting
Thailand into "the focal point of U.S. covert and psychological operations
in Southeast Asia," undertaking "covert operations on a large and effective
scale" throughout Indochina, and in general, acting forcefully to undermine
the Accords and the UN Charter. The wording, repeated verbatim annually in
planning documents, was chosen so as to make explicit the US right to
violate Article 51 of the Charter, which permits the use of force only in
immediate self-defense against "armed attack." The US proceeded to define
"aggression" to include "political warfare, or subversion," what UN
Ambassador Adlai Stevenson called "internal aggression" while defending
JFK's escalation in South Vietnam. US attacks were therefore transmuted into
"self-defense" against "internal aggression." When the US bombed Libyan
cities in 1986, the official justification was "self defense against future
attack," a ludicrous distortion of the Charter applauded by legal
specialists in the national press. The US invasion of Panama was defended in
the Security Council by appeal to Article 51, which, US Ambassador Pickering
declared, "provides for the use of armed force to defend a country, to
defend our interests and our people," and permits the U.S. to invade Panama
to prevent its "territory from being used as a base for smuggling drugs into
the United States" -- an astonishing concept of "armed attack," which passed
without criticism. In June 1993, when Clinton launched a missile attack on
Baghdad, killing civilians, UN Ambassador Albright appealed to Article 51,
explaining that the bombing was in "self-defense against armed attack" --
namely, an alleged attempt to assassinate former president Bush two months
earlier. The claim would have been remarkable even if the US had had
credible evidence of Iraqi involvement, which, officials conceded, they did
not. These and innumerable other examples illustrate far-reaching contempt
for the rule of law. The US has always relied on the rule of force in
international affairs. International law, treaties, the World Court, War
Crimes Tribunals, moral judgment, etc., are regularly invoked against
enemies, often quite accurately."
Source: PBS, March 12, 1998

"The list of the states that have joined the coalition against terror is
quite impressive. They have a characteristic in common. They are certainly
among the leading terrorist states in the world. And they happen to be led
by the world champion."
Source: Talk titled "The New War Against Terror" at MIT, October 18, 2001

"Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants
to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The
United States hires terrorist states."
Source: Talk titled "Distorted Morality" at Harvard University, February
2002

"I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world,
which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop."
Source: Debate with Bill Bennett on CNN, May 30, 2002

"The Japanese could read the US press, with its lurid discussion of how US
bombing could exterminate this inferior and vicious race by burning down
Japan's wooden cities, and they knew that flying fortresses capable of
bombing Japan from Pearl Harbor and Manila were coming off the Boeing
Assembly line, so they "knew" that there was a serious threat of
extermination, not just terror. Therefore, according to the "Bush doctrine,"
shared by Kerry and elites generally, Japan had every right to bomb Pearl
Harbor and Manila. In fact, they had a far stronger case than the one
enunciated by Colin Powell, etc.: that "intent and ability" suffice to allow
the US to attack a country, committing the "supreme crime" of Nuremberg,
which encompasses all the evil that follows -- the crime for which any
participants, such as the German foreign minister, were hanged. In 1945 the
US was not willing to tolerate principles that would justify the Pearl
Harbor attack. Today, it insists on principles that permit far more freedom
to resort to violence and aggression, though of course there is a
reservation, usually tacit but sometimes made explicit by the more honest
commentators, like Henry Kissinger. He approves of the doctrine, but adds
that it must not be "universalized": the right to commit the supreme crime
for which Nazi leaders were hanged must be reserved to the United States,
perhaps delegated to its clients."
Source: ZNet forum reply, October 23, 2004 (followup)

"...I think the basic question you ask is a good one: if we were to withdraw
our own beating people over the heads with clubs, would it necessarily
follow that somebody else would take that role, or are there other
alternatives? Well yeah, there are other alternatives. For example, the
alternatives that are favored by the overwhelming majority of the population
of the United States. I mentioned one piece of it: let the UN function. The
UN isn't perfect, a lot of things wrong with it, just like the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights isn't perfect... But one step would be to pay
some respect to the "decent opinion of mankind", to quote the famous author,
and let international institutions function so as to reduce the likelihood
that anybody will use force..."
Source: Talk titled "The Idea of Universality in Linguistics and Human
Rights" at MIT, March 15, 2005

"How could US leaders promote democracy in principle? They are opposed to it
within the US, for obvious reasons [...] for example: the sharp divergence
between public opinion and the policies they implement. Sometimes the
visceral hatred of democracy becomes so dramatic that it takes real talent
to miss it, as in the New-Old Europe farce of the past few years. The
distinguishing criterion is very precise: Old Europe, the bad guys to be
reviled, are the governments that took the same position as the large
majority of their populations; New Europe, the grand hope for democracy, are
the governments that overruled an even larger majority of their populations
and took their orders from Crawford Texas. Really impressive discipline was
required to "miss it," and even more, to identify Paul Wolfowitz as the
"idealist in chief" whose "passion for democracy" brings tears to one's
eyes -- as illustrated, for example, by his bitter denunciation of the
Turkish military in 2003 for not compelling the government to overrule the
will of 95% of the population and follow Washington's orders."
Source: ZNet forum reply, May 23, 2005

"There's basically two principles that define the Bush Administration
policies: stuff the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increase
your control over the world. Almost everything follows from that. If you
happen to blow up the world, well, you know, it's somebody else's business.
Stuff happens, as Rumsfeld said."
Source: Interview by Geov Parrish, December 23, 2005
[edit]


=On corruption=

"My view, for what it's worth, is that Kennedy was probably the most
dangerous president we've had. [applause] There was a really dangerous,
macho streak there, which was kind of fanatic. A lot of it is coming out now
in the coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is quite revealing. It
looks even worse than it looked before. And an awful lot of this willingness
to drive the world to total destruction looks like a matter of protecting
your macho image. Now, that kind of stuff is really dangerous. It's much
better -- the best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt.
It's the ones who are after power - they are the dangerous ones. So the guys
who want to watch television and sleep and so on, they are no big problem. I
should say the same about corruption. Corruption is a very positive sign of
government. You should always be in favor of corruption. If people are
interested in enriching themselves or in sex or something like that, then
they are not interested in power. And the most dangerous thing is the guys
that want power. That's what Kennedy was like, I think. Furthermore,
corruption has a way of being exposed for quite simple reasons. When people
are corrupt, they are usually robbing other rich people. Therefore they are
going to block people and when corruption gets exposed it weakens power. And
so that's one of the ways you can defend yourself. The same is true of the
evangelicals. If we had evangelicals who were really after power, we'd be in
trouble. If all they want is gold Cadillacs and sex and so on, no big
problem. That's good."
Source: Talk titled "Necessary Illusions" at MIT, May 10, 1989

"If Hitler had been a crook... We're very fortunate in the United States,
we've never had a charismatic leader who weren't a gangster. Every one of
them was a thug, or a robber, or something. Which is fine, then they don't
cause a lot of trouble. If you get one who's honest, like Hitler, then
you're in trouble - they just want power."
Source: Interview by Matthew Rothschild, 1997

"The Ottoman Empire was an ugly affair, but they had the right idea. The
rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone
pretty much -- were mostly interested in robbing them -- and they left them
alone to run their own affairs, and their own regions and their own
communities with a lot of local self determination."
Source: Talk titled "Prospects for Peace in the Middle East" at the
University of Toledo, Ohio, March 4, 2001
[edit]


=Watergate scandal=

"If we try to keep a sense of balance, the exposures of the past several
months are analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder Inc. were
also cheating on their income tax. Reprehensible, to be sure, but hardly the
main point."
Source: New York Review of Books, September 20, 1973

"So in terms of all the horrifying atrocities the Nixon government carried
out, Watergate isn't even worth laughing about. It was a triviality.
Watergate is a very clear example of what happens to servants when they
forget their role and go after the people who own the place: they are very
quickly put back into their box, and somebody else takes over. You couldn't
ask for a better illustration of it than that -- and it's even more dramatic
because this is the great exposure that's supposed to demonstrate what a
free and critical press we have. What Watergate really shows is what a
submissive and obedient press we have, as the comparisons to COINTELPRO and
Cambodia illustrate very clearly."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002
[edit]


=On freedom of speech=

"Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their
research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and
destroy. [...] the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus,
on the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open
and above board, so that people would know what is happening and act
accordingly."
Source: In Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, referring to 1969

"If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for
views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views
he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means
you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise."
Source: In Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

"It's extremely important to preserve freedom of speech, and not to grant
the state the right to determine what is or isn't said. A sometimes
conflicting right is privacy and protection against verbal or other forms of
violence. Once the state is granted the right to prevent speech (writing,
songs, etc.) that it claims might precipitate harm, we're on a very
dangerous slope. That's why the Supreme Court, in 1969, finally reached the
standard of protection of speech that was proposed during the Enlightenment
(and I believe may be unique to the US): speech is protected until the point
where it is part of imminent criminal acts. So if you and I go into a store
to rob it, you have a gun, and I say "shoot," that's not protected speech.
How far should it go? Very delicate questions, and my personal feeling is
that one should err on the side of restricting state power, as a general
rule."
Source: ZNet forum reply, August 7, 2005
[edit]


=On social change=

"No less insidious is the cry for 'revolution,' at a time when not even the
germs of new institutions exist, let alone the moral and political
consciousness that could lead to a basic modification of social life. If
there will be a 'revolution' in America today, it will no doubt be a move
towards some variety of fascism. We must guard against the kind of
revolutionary rhetoric that would have had Karl Marx burn down the British
Museum because it was merely part of a repressive society. It would be
criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions,
or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most of us
enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or
even replace them by a better social order. One who pays some attention to
history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must
smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new
system of repression."
Source: American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969

"If you had asked my grandmother whether she is oppressed, she probably
wouldn't have understood what you are talking about; that's life. If you'd
asked my mother, you'd have found that she resented it, but accepted it, as
life. If you'd ask my daughters, they'd tell you to get lost. That reflects
hard-won victories for freedom."
Source: ZNet forum reply, December 26, 2004
[edit]


=On intelligence agencies=

"If any of you have ever looked at your FBI file, you discover that
intelligence agencies in general are extremely incompetent. That's one of
the reasons why there are so many intelligence failures. They just never get
anything straight, for all kinds of reasons. Part of it is because of the
information they get. The information they get comes from ideological
fanatics, typically, who always misunderstand things in their own crazy way.
If you look at an FBI file, say, about yourself, where you know what the
facts are, you'll see that the information has some kind of relation to the
facts, you can figure out what they're talking about, but by the time it
works its way through the ideological fanaticism of the intelligence
agencies, there's always weird distortion."
Source: Q&A with community activists, February 10, 1989

"...the incompetence of intelligence agencies is legendary. Every one of
which you have records at all, whether it's the CIA, or the Israeli Mossad,
or British M-6 or whatever they're called, they're just error after error...
Some of them are almost unimaginable. [...] Just take Vietnam. That was the
top issue in American international affairs for, you know, 30 years. And we
have a record of intelligence, very unusual record of intelligence, because
it was not released by the government, it was stolen from them. So it's like
capturing enemy archives. That's the Pentagon Papers. That's a 25-year
record of high level intelligence, raw intelligence, CIA, DIA, whole bunch,
State Department intelligence. A lot of it is in there, and it's very
intriguing to look at it. In fact, the most interesting revelation of the
Pentagon Papers in my view by far is the intelligence record. Here's roughly
what happened, if you're interested I've gone through it in print in detail,
but here's the main story. In the late 1940s, the United States was kind of
unclear about which side to support. That was true in Indonesia, it was true
in Vietnam. You know, do you support the colonial power that's trying to
reconquer it, or do you support the indigenous government and then try to
take them over, that was their question. [audience laughter] And they made
different decisions in different places. In the case of Indochina, for
whatever reason, they decided at one point to support France, in it's
reconquest of Indochina. Well, at that point, essentially orders went to the
U.S. intelligence communities, CIA and others, to demonstrate what was
required. What was required to justify the support of France was that Ho Chi
Minh and the Viet Minh were agents of either the Russians or the Chinese,
didn't really matter, one or the other. But they had to be agents of the
international communist conspiracy. OK, that would then justify support of
the French reconquest. Everyone knew that was untrue, but that was plainly
required for doctrinal reasons in order to support France and it's
reconquest. OK, then comes a comic opera scene, for about 3 years, in which
U.S. intelligence tries to prove what is necessary, that Ho Chi Minh and the
Viet Minh are agents of the international communist conspiracy. And they
tried, and tried, either China or Russia, they didn't care, anything would
do. They couldn't do it, they couldn't find anything. They came back,
occasionally they'd say, 'Well we think we found copy of Pravda in the
Bangkok legation', or something. But finally the intelligence concluded,
look, this is very weird, but that is the only place in South East Asia
where a nationalist movement has no connections at all with China or Russia.
OK, what was the conclusion? The conclusion in the State Department was, OK,
this proves that they're agents of the international communist conspiracy.
Ho Chi Minh is such a loyal slave of, pick it, Mao or Stalin, that he
doesn't even need orders. [audience laughter] He just does it automatically,
so you don't even have to have connections. From that point on, U.S.
intelligence never investigated the question of whether the North
Vietnamese, the Vietnamese but that's what they were, were following their
own national interest. That issue was not discussable. In fact, in this
25-year record, turns out there's one staff paper, which was never even
submitted, that raises the possibility that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh
were concerned with their own national interests instead of acting as agents
of the international communist conspiracy. Well you know, anybody with a
head screwed on knew that they were following national interests, but U.S.
intelligence could not contemplate that possibility because it was
doctrinally unacceptable. That's very similar to what was going on in the
academic world, I should say. And you can't imagine a more dramatic case, I
don't know which to call it, incompetence or whatever, doctrinal control.
And this happens all the time. Take, say, the Israeli Mossad, which has a
reputation for fantastic insights and so on. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982
with the intention of destroying secular Palestinian nationalism, that was
the goal, it was basically an attack on the PLO. OK, what did they get?
Well, they ended up with a fundamentalist islamic movement which drove them
out of Lebanon, Hezbollah. Israel's major defeat, they were expelled from
most of Lebanon by resistance movement which was basically islamic
fundamentalist. OK, they did destroy the secular PLO and instead what they
got was a islamic fundamentalist movement that they couldn't control, drove
them out of most of Lebanon. What did they do next? They did exactly the
same thing in the West Bank. They undermined the secular PLO, and they ended
up with Hamas on their hands, which they can't control. And they don't
understand it, they just keep making the same mistake over and over again.
It's just out of ideological fanaticism. And I think you find that wherever
you look at intelligence activities."
Source: Talk titled "Sovereignty and World Order" at Kansas State
University, September 20, 1999
[edit]


=On drugs=

"One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is
suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere,
with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major
corporations. Tobacco is quite another story."
Source: Deterring Democracy, 1992

"As for drugs, my impression is that their effect was almost completely
negative, simply removing people from meaningful struggle and engagement.
Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite
arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together
interviews with Bob Dylan from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the
references), and I was listening (I'd never heard him talk before -- if you
can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely
coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He
said over and over that he'd been through all of this protest thing,
realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to
live his own life happily and freely, not to "mess around with other
people's lives" by working for civil and human rights, ending war and
poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley "free speech
movement" and said that he didn't understand it. He said something like: "I
have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me.
Period." If the capitalist PR machine [term used in the question] wanted to
invent someone for their purposes, they couldn't have made a better choice."
Source: Reply (via email) to Douglas Lain, June 1994

"As the most powerful state, the U.S. makes its own laws, using force and
conducting economic warfare at will. It also threatens sanctions against
countries that do not abide by its conveniently flexible notions of "free
trade." In one important case, Washington has employed such threats with
great effectiveness (and GATT approval) to force open Asian markets for U.S.
tobacco exports and advertising, aimed primarily at the growing markets of
women and children. The U.S. Agriculture Department has provided grants to
tobacco firms to promote smoking overseas. Asian countries have attempted to
conduct educational anti-smoking campaigns, but they are overwhelmed by the
miracles of the market, reinforced by U.S. state power through the sanctions
threat. Philip Morris, with an advertising and promotion budget of close to
$9 billion in 1992, became China's largest advertiser. The effect of
Reaganite sanction threats was to increase advertising and promotion of
cigarette smoking (particularly U.S. brands) quite sharply in Japan, Taiwan,
and South Korea, along with the use of these lethal substances. In South
Korea, for example, the rate of growth in smoking more than tripled when
markets for U.S. lethal drugs were opened in 1988. The Bush Administration
extended the threats to Thailand, at exactly the same time that the "war on
drugs" was declared; the media were kind enough to overlook the coincidence,
even suppressing the outraged denunciations by the very conservative
Surgeon-General. Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto estimates
that among Chinese children under 20 today, 50 million will die of
cigarette-related diseases, an achievement that ranks high even by 20th
century standards."
Source: In Tony Evans (ed.), Human Rights Fifty Years on: A Reappraisal,
1997

"If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the US
White House, its secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug
production just follows. It started in France after the Second World War
when the United States was essentially trying to reinstitute the traditional
social order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance
and destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was reconstitute
the Mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the
Mafia doesn't do it for fun, so there was a tradeoff: Essentially, they
allowed them to reinstitute the heroin production system, which had been
destroyed by the Fascists. The Fascists tended to run a pretty tight ship;
they didn't want any competition, so they wiped out the Mafia. But the US
reconstituted it, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with
the Corsican Mafia. That's where the famous French Connection comes from.
That was the main heroin center for many years. Then US terrorist activities
shifted over to Southeast Asia. If you want to carry out terrorist
activities, you need local people to do it for you, and you also need secret
money to pay for it, clandestine hidden money. Well, if you need to hire
thugs and murderers with secret money, there aren't many options. One of
them is the drug connection. The so-called Golden Triangle around Burma,
Laos and Thailand became a big drug producing area with the help of the
United States, as part of the secret wars against those populations."
Source: Interview by John Veit in High Times, April 1998

"Having a substance should not be considered a crime, because so far it's
victimless. If you want to talk about distributing substances that are
lethal, yeah, that oughta be brought up, but then, let's be serious. Tobacco
is far ahead of anything else. Alcohol is second. Hard drugs are way down
the bottom, and furthermore most drug use, though it's very harmful for the
person, has very little social effect. The crime associated with hard drugs
is mostly a consequence of criminalization. [Q: so should we go after the
people who make cigarettes?] If the principle is, let's not get lethal
substances out to the public, the first one you'd go after is tobacco, the
next one you'd go after is alcohol, way down the list you'd get to cocaine,
and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana. [Q: a lot more violence
comes from someone snorting some coke?] No, it doesn't. It comes from
purchasing coke and selling coke, but that's because it's illegal. That's
because of the criminalization of it, not the effect. There're good studies
of this. Tobacco doesn't happen to cause violence, but alcohol definitely
does. The deaths that are alcohol related are way beyond the deaths that are
hard drugs related, if you separate, in the hard drugs case, the deaths that
are the result of criminalization. So yeah, when you have drug gangs and
narcotraffickers fighting for turfs and so on, sure, then there's gonna be
plenty of killings. Just like when you had Al Capone running Chicago. But
that's a consequence of the criminalization, not the drugs. What drugs tend
to do is make people passive. Alcohol on the other hand makes them violent.
There're extensive studies in the criminality literature, and you can take a
look at the results. The basic result is that tobacco related deaths are way
beyond anything else, just an order of magnitude greater. Furthermore those
are not just to the user, they're to everybody else. So deaths from passive
smoking alone are much higher than drug related deaths. Furthermore they're
transferred on to the next generation. Alcohol is the next biggest killer,
and it's a killer not only to the people who use it, which is bad enough,
but also to others, because of its relation to violence. Next is things like
hard drugs, and they are rarely harmful to others, they're harmful to the
user. When you get down to marijuana, last time I looked there had been
about 60 million users and not one known case of overdose. I mean it's not
good for you, undoubtably, but it's probably at the level of coffee. And in
fact notice that there has never been a medical reason for criminalizing
marijuana. I've looked through the history of this if you're interested, I
don't know if you want me to run through it, but it's an interesting
history. Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're
associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people,
or working people. So for example in England in the 19th century, there was
a period when gin was criminalized and whiskey wasn't, because gin is what
poor people drink. That's kinda like the sentencing for crack and powder. In
the early stages of Prohibition in the United States, one of the targets was
immigrant workers, these guys hanging around the saloons in New York, gotta
go after them. The rich guys in upstate New York, they're gonna drink no
matter what, you know, they wanna come home after work, they'll drink. But,
go after those guys. What about marijuana? Marijuana was brought in by
Mexicans, and the first criminalization of marijuana was in the southwest,
in the states. It was in New Mexico, later Utah, and so on, and it was
specifically targeted against Mexicans. It didn't get criminalized in the
United States until shortly after Prohibition ended. After Prohibition ended
we had this huge bureau of narcotics, and it had to do something. So they
discovered, you know, that marijuana is gonna do all kind of terrible things
to you. The Senate testimony about this is mind-boggling. They did have a
representative of the American Medical Association, who said we don't have
any medical evidence about this. He was shut up, denounced, you know, get
rid of him right away. Then they found somebody else, this is literally
true, they found a pharmacologist, a guy teaching at Temple University, who
was doing experiments with marijuana and dogs. The testimony is hilarious,
you really have to read it. They brought this guy and he testified that when
he gave marijuana to dogs they went insane, you know, they'd do all kind of
things. And then, some senator or somebody asked him, this is from memory,
so it's probably a little off, but something like this, it's in the
thirties. They asked the guy, well have you ever tried marijuana on humans?
So he said, yeah, he tried it on himself. And he said, well, what happened?
He said, I turned into a vulture, I started flying around the room. So they,
oh my god, this stuff is terrible, it makes people insane. And it was
declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But then something
happened. It turned out that lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I
can use this for an insanity defense. So if a guy who killed 3 cops, his
lawyer would say, well, you know, he had marijuana before so he was insane,
so you can't do anything. And people were getting off on charges, like cop
killing for example, on the claim that they had marijuana. So all of a
sudden it was discovered that marijuana doesn't make you insane. Congress
decided, sorry, it doesn't make you insane, because we wanna wipe that out.
The next idea was, marijuana is an entry drug, it's the drug you take and
then you go on to something else. Well, there was never any evidence for
that, but that was decided. And then in the early fifties, something else
happened, marijuana is being brought in here by Red Chinese to poison the
American population and destroy us. So therefore we gotta stop marijuana.
And it kinda goes on like this. Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I
said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in
jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw
people in jail for it, when it was poor people."
Source: Dialogue with trade unionists, February 2, 1999

"There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it's called
sugar. If you look at the history of imperialism, a lot of it has to do with
that. A lot of the imperial conquest, say in the Caribbean, set up a kind of
a network... The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug
producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to
enslave Africans, and it was done largely to pacify working people in
England who were being driven into awful circumstances by the early
industrial revolution. That's why so many wars took place around the
Caribbean."
Source: Talk at the University of Houston, Texas, October 18, 2002
[edit]


=On sports=

"...another thing you sometimes find in non-literate cultures is development
of the most extraordinary linguistic systems: often there's tremendous
sophistication about language, and people play all sorts of games with
language. So there are puberty rites where people who go through the same
initiation period develop their own language that's usually some
modification of the actual language, but with quite complex mental
operations differentiating it -- then that's theirs for the rest of their
lives, and not other people's. And what all these things look like is that
people just want to use their intelligence somehow, and if you don't have a
lot of technology and so on, you do other things. Well, in our society, we
have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but
people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way -- so what
they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're
trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work
around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive
observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out
of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folks. So what's left? Well,
one thing that's left is sports -- so you put a lot of the intelligence and
the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one
of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the
population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that
really matter."
Source: In Understanding Power, 2002

"I've often been struck by the extensive knowledge that people have of
sports, and particularly, their self-confidence in discussing it with
"experts." While driving, I sometimes turn on radio talk shows on sports,
and am always struck by this. People calling in have no hesitation in
criticizing the coaches, the judgments of the people running the shows, etc.
In contrast, when discussing matters of concern to human lives -- their own
and others -- people tend to defer to "experts," though for the most part
the expert knowledge is no more beyond them than how the local professional
sports team should play their next game. That's where the indoctrination
comes in: in the intensive training that brings people to feel that they
must defer to alleged "experts" on matters of very direct concern to them,
far more so than sports. I do, however, agree that there can be negative
aspects to the heavily promoted frenzy on spectator sports, loyalty to the
home team, etc. Depends very much on how it is carried out."
Source: ZNet forum reply, November 21, 2004
[edit]


=On religion=

"Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical
analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals
today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we
condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the
time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab
were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into
the desert and imprisoned."
Source: Interview by Harry Kreisler, March 22, 2002

"Take any country that has laws against hate crimes, inspiring hatred and
genocide and so on. The first thing they would do is ban the Old Testament.
There's nothing like it in the literary canon that exalts genocide, to that
extent. And it's not a joke either. Like where I live, New England, the
people who liberated it from the native scourge were religious
fundamentalist lunatics, who came waving the holy book, declaring themselves
to be the children of Israel who are killing the Amalekites, like God told
them."
Source: Talk at the University of Houston, Texas, October 18, 2002

"You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and
decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most
genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible - not only did He
order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide - I mean, wipe out
every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so
on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying
to cross the desert - not only did He do things like that, but, after all,
the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth
because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's
beyond genocide - you don't know how to describe this creature. Somebody
offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And
then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive - that's
supposed to be gentle and wonderful."
Source: Interview by Wallace Shawn, October 19, 2004
[edit]


=On moral responsibility=

"It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the
violence of the state. Those who choose to disregard this responsibility can
justly be accused of complicity in war crimes, which is itself designated as
'a crime under international law' in the principles of the Charter of
Nuremberg."
Source: Preface to Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam, 1971

"Rio de Janeiro, incidently, is not the poor part of the country, that sort
of the rich part of the country. It's not the northeast, where 35 million
people or so, nobody knows what happens to them, or cares. But Rio de
Janeiro, that's where people are looking, the rich parts. And this journal
is a science journal, kinda like Science in the United States. It was
studying malnutrition. And here's the figures it had for Rio de Janeiro:
infants from 0 to 5 months, severe malnutrition, meaning medically severe,
67%; 5 months to a year, 41%; a year to 5 years, 11%. Now the reason of
course for the decline, from 67 to 41 to 11, is that they will die. So
that's what happens under the conditions of the economic miracle, like in
Guatemala. Now, it's a little wrong to say that the people die. The fact is,
they don't die. We kill them, that's what happens. We kill them by carrying
out policies, supporting the regimes of the kind that I've described. And by
intervening with force and violence to suppress and destroy any attempt,
however minimal, even on a speck like Grenada, we've got to stop any attempt
to bring some change into this. That's the history of our hemisphere."
Source: Talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, May
14, 1984

"We're not analyzing the media on Mars or in the eighteenth century or
something like that. We're dealing with real human beings who are suffering
and dying and being tortured and starving because of policies that we are
involved in, we as citizens of democratic societies are directly involved in
and are responsible for, and what the media are doing is ensuring that we do
not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served,
not the needs of the suffering people, and not even the needs of the
American people who would be horrified if they realized the blood that's
dripping from their hands because of the way they are allowing themselves to
be deluded and manipulated by the system."
Source: In Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

"Of course it's extremely easy to say, the heck with it. I'm just going to
adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can
within them. Sure, you can do that. But that's not acting like a decent
person. You can walk down the street and be hungry. You see a kid eating an
ice cream cone and you notice there's no cop around and you can take the ice
cream cone from him because you're bigger and walk away. You can do that.
Probably there are people who do. We call them "pathological." On the other
hand, if they do it within existing social structures we call them "normal."
But it's just as pathological. It's just the pathology of the general
society."
Source: Interview with Michael Albert, January 1993

"I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had
the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be
utterly appalled."
Source: Interview by Svetlana Vukovic & Svetlana Lukic on Radio B92,
Belgrade, Serbia, September 19, 2001

[Q: do you believe that a nation should suffer a detrimental cost in order
to compensate for wrongs committed by the governors of that nations, or by
segments of that nation in the past?] "Suppose you're living under a
dictatorship, and the dictators carry out some horrendous acts. So you're
living in Stalinist Russia, let's say, and Stalin carries out horrible
crimes. Are the people of Russia responsible for those crimes? Well, to only
a very limited extent, because living under a brutal, harsh, terrorist
regime, there isn't very much they can do about it. There's something they
can do, and to the extent that you can do something, you're responsible for
what happens. Suppose you're living in a free, democratic society, with lots
of privilege, enormous, incomparable freedoms, and the government carries
out violent, brutal acts. Are you responsible for it? Yeah, a lot more
responsible, because there's a lot that you can do about it. If you share
responsibility in criminal acts, you are liable for the consequences."
Source: Interview by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN, June 1, 2003

"The past month was the 10th anniversary of the massacres in Rwanda, and
there was much soul-searching about our failure to do anything about them.
So headlines read "To Say `Never Again' and Mean it; the 1994 Rwandan
genocide should have taught us about the consequences of doing nothing"
(Richard Holbrooke, Washington Post); "Learn from Rwanda" (Bill Clinton,
Washington Post). So what did we learn? In Rwanda, for 100 days people were
being killed at the rate of about 8000 a day, and we did nothing. Fast
forward to today. In Africa, about 10,000 children a day are dying from
easily treatable diseases, and we are doing nothing to save them. That's not
just 100 days, it's every day, year after year, killing at the Rwanda rate.
And far easier to stop then Rwanda: it just means pennies to bribe drug
companies to produce remedies. But we do nothing. Which raises another
question: what kind of socioeconomic system can be so savage and insane that
to stop Rwanda-scale killings among children going on year after year it's
necessary to bribe the most profitable industry that ever existed? That's
carrying socioeconomic lunacy beyond the bounds that even the craziest
maniac could imagine? But we do nothing."
Source: ZNet forum reply, May 9, 2004

"Say, take Rachel Corrie, local young woman, she was extremely courageous.
She's a martyr for peace and justice. We happened to kill her too, even if
we don't like to admit it. She was killed by U.S. sent equipment, which is
Caterpillar... [Q: you draw that line right back to you and me sitting
here?] Absolutely, we're responsible for it. I mean, we didn't drive the
bulldozer, but why is it there? What's it doing? Who provides the military,
economic, and diplomatic support for destroying the occupied territories?"
Source: Interview by Steve Scher on KUOW, in Seattle, Washington, April 20,
2005
[edit]

=On artificial intelligence=

"The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long
division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can
murder or airplanes can fly -- or people; after all, the "flight" of the
Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of
the chicken champion (so I'm told). These are questions of decision, not
fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of
common usage."
Source: Powers and Prospects, 1996

"A lot of sophistication has been developed about the utilization of
machines for complex purposes, and it doesn't make sense not to use it if
you can think of a good question to ask. Playing chess is about the dumbest
question you can ask. But, if you want, maybe can make money that way, or
something. In fact, what's going on with the chess is about as interesting
as the fact that a front-end loader can lift more than an Olympics champion,
weight lifter, or something. Probably so, but, you know, these are just not
serious questions."
Source: Talk titled "Language & Mind", 1997
[edit]


§==About Noam Chomsky==§
=Political leaders=

"I was reading recently, Noam Chomsky, I read him very frequently. And in
one of his most recent books, Chomsky, I would like very much to shake hands
with Chomsky. I've been reading him for a while. I admire him
enormously." --Hugo Chávez, September 16, 2005 [1]

"Why won't Chomsky come to Iraq?" --Ibrahim al-Jaafari, February 2006 [2]


=Press=

"Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought,
Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today. He is
also a disturbingly divided intellectual. On the one hand there is a large
body of revolutionary and highly technical linguistic scholarship, much of
it too difficult for anyone but the professional linguist or philosopher; on
the other, an equally substantial body of political writings, accessible to
any literate person but often maddeningly simple-minded. The 'Chomsky
problem' is to explain how these two fit together." --Paul Robinson/New York
Times, February 25, 1979 [3]

"Yet [Chomsky's The Responsibility of Intellectuals essay] defined the peace
movement as much as any document and pushed the name Chomsky up there with
Thoreau and Emerson in the literature of rebellion." --Rolling Stone, May
28, 1992 [4]

"Reading Chomsky is like standing in a wind tunnel. With relentless logic,
Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us--and to
discern what they are leaving out. The answers become clear enough, he says.
The catch is they won't be the ones we want to hear. [...] Chomsky, as he
often does, has a voice problem. He is shrill and sarcastic--chiefly because
he's angry with what he sees as rampant American hypocrisy. [...] If there
is anything new about our age, it is that the questions Chomsky raises will
eventually have to be answered. Agree with him or not, we lose out by not
listening." --BusinessWeek, April 17, 2000 [5]

"How did we ever get to be an empire? The writings of Noam Chomsky --
America's most useful citizen, in my opinion -- are the best answer to that
question." --Boston Globe, April 25, 2004 [6]

"It's a real shame that only Mr. Chomsky's tedious harangues against America
get any attention. His body of work deserves more serious treatment. The
interesting yet overlooked aspects of his political philosophy cannot easily
fit into the left-right dichotomy. What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his
criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from
the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not
Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the
free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world
and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with
private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on
democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand in hand. The
rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of
market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to
be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it:
"The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state
protection for the rich." He has spoken positively about the work of
Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty
in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack
clearly defined property rights." --Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2005
[7]


=Political writers (left-wing)=

"Chomsky's morally impassioned and powerfully argued denunciation of
American aggression in Vietnam and throughout the world is the most moving
political document I have read since the death of Leon Trotsky. It is
inspiring to see a brilliant scientist risk his prestige, his access to
lucrative government grants, and his reputation for Olympian objectivity by
taking a clearcut, no-holds-barred, adversary position on the burning
moral-political issue of the day, and by castigating the complacent
mythology of "specialized expertise" under which many academic intellectuals
shrug off the crimes committed by their government, only provided they are
not naked enough (e.g., the Dominican intervention) to defy the most
accomplished casuistry." --Raziel Abelson, April 20, 1967 [8]

"The major international campaign orchestrated against Chomsky on completely
false pretexts was only part - though perhaps a crucial part - of the
ambitious campaign launched in the late 70s with the hope of reconstructing
the ideology of power and domination which had been partially exposed during
the Indochina war. The magnitude of the insane attack against Chomsky, which
aimed at silencing him and robbing him of his moral stature and his prestige
and influence, is of course one more tribute to the impact of his writings
and his actions - not for nothing he was the only one singled out." --Carlos
P. Otero, Language and Politics, 1988 [9]

"Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the
United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often
at gunpoint) to other nations- he is nearly the only person now writing who
assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical
effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual
conviction." --Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument ("The 'We'
Fallacy"), February 1988

"[Chomsky's work was] subjected to an ongoing and intense scrutiny for any
literal errors or bases of vulnerability, a scrutiny from which
establishment experts are entirely free. This search was perhaps more
intense in the United States and among its allies in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, with a growing body of hard-liners anxious to overcome the
Vietnam syndrome, revitalize the arms race, strengthen support for Israel's
rejectionism and policy of force and involve the United States in more
aggressive actions towards the Soviet bloc and Third World. [...] The
Cambodia and Faurisson disputes imposed a serious personal cost on Chomsky.
He put up a diligent defence against the attacks and charges against him,
answering virtually every letter and written criticism that came to his
attention. He wrote many hundreds of letters to correspondents and editors
on these topics, along with numerous articles, and answered many phone
enquiries and queries in interviews. The intellectual and moral drain was
severe. It is an astonishing fact, however, that he was able to weather
these storms with his energies, morale, sense of humour and vigour and
integrity of his political writings virtually intact." --Edward S. Herman,
In Otero (ed.), Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments (Vol. III), 1994 [10]

"Those who challenge the 'Right to Lie', as Chomsky describes it, can expect
to be met with vilification and distortion. Such vilification campaigns
succeed by making the accusation against the critics the topic of debate. By
forcing critics into an endless defence of their position, the propaganda
system distracts attention from the substantive issues." --Milan Rai,
Chomsky's Politics, 1995 [11]

"His focus, almost exclusively, has been on U.S. foreign policy, a
narrowness that would exert a conservative influence even for a radical
thinker. If urging increased involvement in politics goes against the
potentially subversive tide toward less and less involvement, Chomsky's
emphasis on statecraft itself gravitates toward acceptance of states. And
completely ignoring key areas (such as nature and women, to mention only
two), makes him less relevant still." --John Zerzan, 1996 [12]

"Chomsky's truly great contribution to the struggle for human freedom is
that he has taken what we have been persuaded to believe is an insane idea,
a product only of individual neurosis - the idea that society is not free
and quite possibly not even sane - and shown it to be empirically,
demonstrably true; he has provided the vital support for the individual to
be able to declare him - and herself - sane against the insanity of society,
despite a million voices declaring that it is the occasional doubter who is
mad." --David Edwards, Burning All Illusions, 1996 [13]

"Unlike many leftists of his generation, Chomsky never flirted with
movements or organizations that were later revealed to be totalitarian,
oppressive, exclusionary, antirevolutionary, or elitist. Leninism,
Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism offered to many of Chomsky's disillusioned
contemporaries an alternative to what they saw as blatantly exclusionary
American-style capitalism. When reports about what had actually occurred in
the former Soviet Union and China began to filter through, many felt
betrayed. We now hear a lot about how the left has been discredited, the
hopelessness of utopian thinking, the futility of activist struggle, but
little about the libertarian options that Chomsky and others have so
consistently presented. The type of dismay that has permeated contemporary
intellectual circles has not touched Chomsky. He has very little to regret.
His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this
century. And yet, most of his criticisms of American policy, past and
present, are seldom mentioned in the mainstream press or by the instructors
and professors who teach history or politics. Political science departments
rarely use his material on Vietnam, the Cold War, Central America, or
Israel." --Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1997 [14]

"Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures,
offers this comment about Leninism: "Western and also Thrid World
intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution because
Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia
have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and
that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals." Here Chomsky
fashions an image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the
revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power's sake. When it
comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not
much better than the worst on the Right. [...] According to Noam Chomsky,
communism "was a monstrosity," and "the collapse of tyranny" in Eastern
Europe and Russia is "an occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values fredom
and human dignity." I treasure freedom and human dignity yet find no
occasion for rejoicing. The postcommunist societies do not represent a net
gain for such values. If anything, the breakup of the communist states has
brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialsim, with its
correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for
revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere." --Michael Parenti,
Blackshirts and Reds, 1997 [15]

"...the problem lies in Chomsky's description of Serb atrocities as "quite
real" and "often ghastly". "Quite real ' is a cop-out for very real.
Atrocities "sharply escalated" after Nato's bombardment, he says, but does
not explain what these were: mass executions, rape, torture. The index
refers to "atrocities" in Afiica, Columbia, East Timor and Turkey without
the appearance of "Serbia"." --Robert Fisk, December 15, 1999 [16]

"There's a humbling insight into the US pretension of occupying the moral
high ground in Chomsky's work. Part of what he's saying is true. Objectively
viewed, the United States isn't the victim but in many contexts, including
its response to terrorism, the perpetrator. [But he's] so preoccupied with
the evils of US imperialism that it completely occupies all the political
and moral space, and therefore it's not possible for him to acknowledge that
even without intending to do so, some US military interventions may actually
have a beneficial effect." --Richard Falk, September 5, 2002 [17]

"Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to
convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I
understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky's work is a barometer
of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that
he's up against. He's like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of
my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood,
grinding it to a fine dust. It's as though he disagrees with the literature
and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests." --Arundhati Roy,
August 24, 2003 [18]

"Regarding his personal character traits the most outstanding is that he is
absolutely faithful, which is something very few people possess... Professor
Chomsky will never betray you, never, it is impossible." --Norman
Finkelstein, November 24, 2003 [19]

"[Bush Administration neoconservatives are] the ones who broke nearly every
precedent of foreign policy in the post-Cold-War world. They're the ones who
chose preventative war over international law. That's what I view as
destructive, not Noam Chomsky pointing it out." --Chalmers Johnson, February
2005 [20]

"He would have us believe that Israel's occupation and harsh actions against
the Palestinians, its invasions and undeclared 20-year war on Lebanon, and
its arming of murderous regimes in Central America and Africa during the
Cold War, has been done as a client state in the service of US interests. In
Chomsky's worldview, that absolves Israel of responsibility and has become
standard Chomsky doctrine." --Jeffrey Blankfort, May 25, 2005 [21]

"He is an disgrace to the memory of his illustrious father Ze'ev (William)
Chomsky, the great Hebrew scholar, who was a member of the IWW not out of
opportunism and as a "mole", but out of genuine ideology." --Doreen Dotan,
July 13, 2006 [22]


=Political writers (liberals)=

"The Americans' very conviction that their goals are good blinds them to the
consequences of their acts. To focus on intentions is to prolong a futile
clash of inflamed self-righteousness; to focus on behavior and results could
get us somewhere. I detect in Professor Chomsky's approach, in his
uncomplicated attribution of evil objectives to his foes, in his fondness
for abstract principles, in his moral impatience, the mirror image of the
very features that both he and I dislike in American foreign policy. To me
sanity does not consist of replying to a crusade with an anti-crusade. As
scholars and as citizens, we must require and provide discriminating and
disciplined reasoning on behalf of our values." --Stanley Hoffmann, March
1969 [23]

"[Noam Chomsky] seems to feel licensed to forget or distort the truth whenev
er it suits his polemical convenience. He begins as a preacher to the world
and ends as an intellectual crook." --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., December 1969
[24]

"The three paragraphs of Mr. Chomsky to which I have referred constitute
less than five percent of his article. I do not know if the level of
veracity which he achieves in them is typical of the entire piece. If these
paragraphs are representative, however, the article as a whole should
contain, by conservative extrapolation, approximately 94 other serious
distortions and misstatements of fact." --Samuel Huntington, February 1970
[25]

"Marxist intellectuals can and do convince themselves to subordinate mind
and ethics to a larger goal or distant cause that frequently slips out of
sight. Anarchist intellectuals are less susceptible to this logic. To use
the language of historical materialism, it is no accident that currently an
anarchist, Noam Chomsky, is the most energetic critic of intellectuals
apologizing for American foreign policy." --Russell Jacoby, The Last
Intellectuals, 1987 [26]

"He seems both wholly cynical about the purposes of those in power, and
wholly unforgiving. Those who direct American policy - and, by implication,
those who direct the policy of any state - are allowed no regrets, no
morals, no feelings, and when they change their policies they appear to do
so for entirely Machiavellian reasons. Chomsky has little interest in the
question of 'good in bad' - of how there can be good behaviour in the
context of bad policies - and seems to deny the complexity of human
affairs..." --Martin Woollacott, January 14, 1989 [27]

"[Noam Chomsky is] so far out on the lunatic fringe that even the sensible
things he has to say are lost." --David Rieff, August 4, 1991 [28]

"As I read your remarks about how Kosovo reverses the usual left/right roles
on intervention, I found myself wondering what Noam Chomsky--who epitomized
the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western
intervention--is saying now. Well, I couldn't find anything about the
current crisis, but thanks to the miracle of search engine technology I did
find some remarks about Bosnia, which are pathetic but revealing: First he
tries to blame it all on the Western Right, then suddenly gets all judicious
and practical." --Paul Krugman, March 29, 1999 [29]

"Chomsky is an irresistible example of the quality problem that besets the
market for academic public intellectuals." --Richard Posner, 2001 [30]

"[Noam Chomsky has] become the guru of the new anti-capitalist and Third
World movements. They take his views very uncritically; it's part of the
Seattle mood - whatever America does is wrong. He confronts orthodoxy but
he's becoming a big simplifier. What he can't see is Third World and other
regimes that are oppressive and not controlled by America." --Fred Halliday,
January 2001 [31]

"Chomsky just has not entered deeply into what he is talking about and he is
not greatly interested in anything except digging out material for
anti-American invective." --Adrian Hastings, June 2001 [32]

"Sneering critics like Noam Chomsky, who condemn the executioners of
thousands only in passing, would not hesitate to honour the vengeful
feelings of Palestinians subjected to Israeli occupation. They have no
standing." --Todd Gitlin, September 23, 2001 [33]

"It is tempting to follow a policy of malign neglect toward Chomsky's latest
screed. But ignoring the book may foster the false impression that Chomsky's
revelations are somehow too explosive to be challenged in a major newspaper.
A far wiser course is to point out the inconsistent arguments and shrill
assertions that are Chomsky's contribution to the public debate. [...] It
would be unfortunate if Chomsky's momentary popularity overshadows
infinitely more reasoned critiques of Bush administration policies. There
are serious questions that should be weighed as America girds for final war
against Saddam Hussein and dispatches military advisers to nations like the
Philippines. Chomsky and his camp followers do not have a monopoly on
dissent. The best response to the frenzied e-mailed dispatches from this
left-wing crank remains public disclosure and ridicule." --Walter Shapiro,
May 7, 2002 [34]

"He defended Faurrison. He championed the Khmer Rouge. His condemnations of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are one hundred percent one-sided, based on
the (obviously) false notion that the Arab nations and the Palestinian
people have been trying to arrange a peace with Israel for decades. He
viewed the rescue mission undertaken in Kosovo as nothing more than the
extension of imperial power. He accuses the United States of perpetrating a
holocaust in Afghanistan and thinks that the mistaken attack on the
pharmaceutical factory in Somalia [sic] was as bad if not worse than the
attack on the Twin Towers. One could go on, but it all adds up to, I fear,
the mirror image of the ignorant jingoism of Bennett, Krauthammer, Kelly,
Will, etc. And I find it amazing that intelligent people take it
seriously." --Eric Alterman, June 2002 [35]

"What we hear in Europe or elsewhere in the world, despite CNN and my son
watches CNN every morning, is President Bush saying that the United States
is the greatest country on earth, almost every day. And Noam Chomsky saying,
the United States is the worst country on earth. And we don't hear a great
deal of all those liberal internationalists, critical voices in between.
Whether this is the job of an officially funded public diplomacy or of other
forms of media, I don't know, but it does seem to me terribly important that
the voices of those other Americans should be heard across the
world." --Timothy Garton Ash, December 5, 2002 [36]

"For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America,
the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those categorized as
oppressed receive scant mention. Because he deems American foreign policy
inherently violent and expansionist, he is unconcerned with the motives
behind particular policies, or the ethics of particular individuals in
government. And since he considers the United States the leading terrorist
state, little distinguishes American air strikes in Serbia undertaken at
night with high-precision weaponry from World Trade Center attacks timed to
maximize the number of office workers who have just sat down with their
morning coffee." --Samantha Power, January 4, 2003 [37]

"I'm not a pacifist. And I am not one of those people, like Noam Chomsky,
with whom I have agreed on some points, I don't agree on this point, who
believes that all uses of American imperial power are by definition wrong. I
suppose in fact I might be called, in a certain stretch, a liberal
imperialist. I believe there are times when great powers can intervene to
prevent atrocities, and should." --Susan Sontag, March 2, 2003 [38]

"Noam Chomsky's idea that Bill Clinton's missile strike on a pharmaceutical
plant in Sudan was worse than "9/11" is plain silly." --Ian Buruma, May 1,
2003 [39]

"PUH-LEEAAZE! Chomsky did not write that Faurisson was a Nazi sympathizer
whose right to free speech needed to be defended on Voltairean principles.
Chomsky wrote that Faurisson seemed to be "a relatively apolitical liberal"
who was being smeared by zionists who--for ideological reasons--did not like
his "findings." Herman then repeats the lie by claiming that Faurisson's
critics were "unable to provide any credible evidence of anti-Semitism or
neo-Naziism." Feh!" --Brad DeLong, July 25, 2003 [40]

"Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in
jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle we
can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance, that despite
rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be killed by
one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well. So do
makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools,
chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute
to the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable
deaths of children on our ski slopes as "skiing atrocities." But you would
not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to
matter. Body count is all." --Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 2005 [41]

"I think that I offended many people when I decimated the postures and the
lies of Noam Chomsky in an article I wrote called "Poisoning the Well in
Academe." That wasn't a conservative screed on my part. That was a liberal's
devotion to the truth, and the exposure of a liar, a person who assaults the
mind by putting in false evidence." --John Silber, November 2005 [42]

"...if the Palestinians accept the solution that professor Chomsky finds
unacceptable, will he use his enormous resources as the most influential
intellectual in the world today to turn the Palestinians against this peace
proposal, or will he lend his great prestige to urging the Palestinians, and
his academic supporters all over the world, to accept a pragmatic compromise
solution. Professor Chomsky, a lot turns on you. You're a very important and
influential person, and therefore you'd understand your power, and use it in
the interests of peace." --Alan Dershowitz, November 29, 2005 [43]

"Western liberalism has a tendency to change the subject when confronted
with the true nature of regimes opposed by the US, even to give them the
benefit of the doubt: look at Noam Chomsky's effective support for the Khmer
Rouge in the 1970s. It is a form of intellectual decadence that won't look
good on the historical record." --Colin Donald, April 15, 2006 [44]

"Here's a man who says that Washington is incurably sinful but offers no,
there's no complexity, no problem, no moral dilemmas in the book. Everything
really that those in power do is seen as essentially and necessarily wrong,
while public opinion is deemed to be faultless." --Adam Roberts, May 15,
2006 [45]

"Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian
analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual
biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the
doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the
world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose. It
is important to recognise this fact because the Chomskian analysis has
become the defining dissident voice of the blogosphere and a certain kind of
far-left academia." --Peter Beaumont, June 18, 2006 [46]

"...it is a pack of lies..." --Michael Bérubé, June 22, 2006 [47]

"It's hard to imagine any American reading this book and not seeing his
country in a new, and deeply troubling, light." --Jonathan Freedland, June
25, 2006 [48]

"...the self-indulgent and auto-congratulatory Noam Chomsky, arguably one of
the most virulent anti-Semitic Jews you can hope to encounter. His endless
diatribes on what he wants you to believe to be the horrible treatment of
the Palestinian people at the hands of the cold-hearted Israeli oppressors
are unparalleled in literary hyperbole. Unfortunately, he doesn't offer one
shred of evidence to back this up. He invites you to join him, the
consummate Jewish intellect, in collective snobbery by simply accepting
(because you are so frightfully well-educated as he is) that what he says is
so. I have yet to see one single person stand up and ask, "Dr. Chomsky, what
is the evidence for this?" Should this take place, hopefully there will be a
paramedic team standing by to resuscitate him." --Moss David Posner, July 3,
2006 [49]

"The spiritual leader of the Left, Noam Chomsky, came to Hezbollah - a
murderous and extreme and nationalist group, according to words of its
leaders themselves - and saluted. The fascism of the Left, like that of the
Right, does not believe in the possibility that the other is also just. They
claim that there is only one truth. We have known this since the days when
in front of the "Sun of the Nations" who murdered millions, people stood and
said that the revolution there is also ours." --Yoram Kaniuk, July 23, 2006
[50]


=Political writers (noninterventionists)=
"Noam Chomsky: He's really an interventionist - and also completely
clueless." --Justin Raimondo, January 18, 2002 [51]


=Political writers (right-wing)=

"In fact, Chomsky's influence is best understood not as that of an
intellectual figure, but as the leader of a secular religious cult - as the
ayatollah of anti-American hate." --David Horowitz, September 26, 2001 [52]

"Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the terrorists who planned
and executed the attacks of September 11 were merely expressing in more
refined form the same anti-Americanism that has been a staple of the
American university for three decades. The ravings of Osama bin Laden and
those of, for instance, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, are
interchangeable." --Mackubin Thomas Owens, October 2001 [53]

"It's a very vulgar, arithmetical, pragmatic way of arguing anyway. If you
do that, then get the facts and figures wrong, well then you're really
****ed. You're ****ed twice." --Christopher Hitchens, May 2002 [54]

"I want Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities about as much as I want
Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing. These are wild and extremist ideas
that I believe have no place in a university." --Daniel Pipes, September
2002 [55]

"Although he lost some of his appeal in the late-1970s and 1980s by his
defense of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, he has used September 11 to
restore his reputation, indeed to surpass his former influence and
stature." --Keith Windschuttle, May 2003 [56]

"Chomsky blasts the United States for having supported [post WWII] internal
movements to liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet totalitarianism. "These
operations included a 'secret army' under U.S.-Nazi auspices that sought to
provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by
and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
through the early 1950s." This U.S.-Nazi army is so "secret" that only
Chomsky knows of it, and he has thus far kept the documentation of it to
himself, lest his secret get out." --Daniel Flynn, Intellectual Morons, 2004
[57]

"Noam Chomsky: Unrepentant Stalinist" --Anders Lewis, April 12, 2004 [58]

"There are some views*, people who support the Soviet Union, as Chomsky did
for so long, who've supported tyranny in all sorts of places, like Chomsky
has done, who have lied consistently, as Chomsky has done, who do not
deserve fundamental respect in this sense. [...] And he is making millions
around the world preaching anti-American-" --Andrew Sullivan, November 5,
2004, [59]

"Interestingly, not every person in the democratic West is overjoyed at
seeing Syrian fascism at last challenged. Noam Chomksy, the MIT inventor of
now-discredited theories of linguistics, is determined to defend and
perpetuate Syrian colonization of Lebanon, no matter how many Lebanese lives
it costs. His reason? He insists Syrian occupation of Lebanon is necessary
as a way to prevent those evil Israelis from doing horrid deeds in Lebanon,
like attempting to protect their citizens from terrorist attacks launched
out of Lebanon." --Steven Plaut, March 7, 2005 [60]

"I really don't believe [that Pat Tillman opposed the war in Iraq and was
going to meet Noam Chomsky], and I think you got it from one of those
documents Mary Mapes handed to Dan Rather." --Ann Coulter, September 27,
2005 [61]

"Noam Chomsky thinks he's the Moses of this age and even those on the Left
who don't agree with him on everything accept his moral authority. But
Chomsky is a socialist who practices capitalism, and an anti-militarist who
has made millions off of Pentagon contracts." --Peter Schweizer, Do As I Say
(Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, October 25, 2005 [62]

"In terms of his 40 year now campaign in favor of Chairman Mao, Pol Pot,
Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden most lately, he is, as I say, thus an
apologist for terror and tyranny, without rival. [...] Most people,
including, by the way, his fellow travelers, like Robert Fisk, can say that
America, even Robert Fisk in fact, that America, like all countries, has its
moral highs and lows. America, I believe, has more moral highs than most.
But he cannot see that. There's always a moral equivalence drawn between the
worst tyrants in history and American presidents, even when American
presidents have waged wars, just wars, to end tyranny." --Mark Dooley,
January 19, 2006 [63]

"Chomsky says America is a warring country seeking to build an empire, not a
liberator trying to achieve peace, freedom, and democracy." --Debbie
Schlussel, February 21, 2006 [64]

"Noam Chomsky, the Dr. No of the hate-America crowd, is accused (by his own
fans, of all people) of playing a little too fast and a little too loose
with the facts in his latest screed, "Failed States." Peter Beaumont,
foreign affairs editor for the London Guardian, writes that he wants to
agree with Dr. No but can't find many reasons to in this latest
book." --Suzanne Fields, June 22, 2006 [65]

"For all the propaganda of al Jazeera, the wounded pride of the Arab Street,
or the vitriol of the Western Left, years from now the truth will remain
that our soldiers did not come to plunder or colonize, but were willing to
die for others' freedom when few others would. Neither Michael Moore nor
Noam Chomsky can change that, because it is not opinion, but
truth..." --Victor Davis Hanson, June 30, 2006 [66]


=Talk radio hosts=
"Chomsky, you're a New World Order shill, and I've got twice the brain
you've got with both arms tied behind my back." --Alex Jones, May 25, 2001
[67]


=Bloggers=
"[Fisking Chomsky is] easy, but fun." --Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), May
12, 2002 [68]

"In any case, Chomsky's problem is not that he's anti-War -- this "war" is
getting sillier by the minute - the problem is that he's an idiot." --Duncan
Black (Atrios), May 15, 2002 [69]


=Wikipedians=
"I personally regard Chomsky as a kook and a half on toast." --Jimmy Wales,
December 8, 2001 [70]


=Software developers=

"Neither Chomsky nor Church would make my top ten list. No, I don't actually
have such a list, but my feeling is that their impact has been more on what
is taught than what is done. Part of my unease is that I'm uncertain to what
extent 'Computer Science' is a science. I feel more comfortable comparing
what my colleagues and I do with the activities of architects and engineers
than with mathematicians, physicists, or biologists. There are things in
software that feel more as if they have been discovered than invented, but
most of what [passes] for computer science is purely man-made." --Bjarne
Stroustrup, November 2000 [71]

"I don't have as complete and overall philosophy as he does. I agree with
some of the things he says. I've seen things that he said that I didn't
agree with. But certainly what he says about the engineering of consent
seems valid. Recently Chomsky gave a speech about what it means to oppose
terrorism which I was very impressed by, because he essentially said that we
should put an end to terrorism, and that includes the terrorism against the
US but also the terrorism committed by the US... and I agree." --Richard
Stallman, November 2001 [72]

"A similar denial is evident in the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky; prodded for
commentary on the war, he recites a litany of past American wrongdoing as if
that somehow banishes the question of how soon Saddam Hussein will have
nuclear weapons and what he will do with them when he gets them." --Eric S.
Raymond, September 13, 2002 [73]


=Novelists=

"People are wasting time on dissident relics like Noam Chomsky. Professor
Chomsky is a pretty good dissident: he's persistent, he means what he says,
and he's certainly very courageous, but this is the 21st century, and
Stallman is a bigger deal. Lawrence Lessig is a bigger deal." --Bruce
Sterling, July 26, 2002 [74]

"And when I did reality checks against the idiotic, immoral, anti-American,
vicious things he says, I find him a moral wasteland, and a fool. And I'll
defend that with anybody, and I'll get out the books and the sources and the
documentation..." --Orson Scott Card, November 2004 [75]

"When Noam Chomsky was merely the most original, arresting, and widely
talked-about linguistic theorist in America, he was never referred to as a
leading American intellectual. That came only after he expressed his outrage
over American involvement in the war in Vietnam, about which he knew
nothing, since he read The Nation instead of Parade. It was the outrage that
gained him entry into that "charming aristocracy," to borrow the words of
Catulle Mendès. Or as Marshall McLuhan once put it, "Moral indignation is a
standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity."" --Tom Wolfe,
December 19, 2005 [76]


=Comedians=

Craig Kilborn: "Name your favorite Charlie's Angel. Give you some time to
think of that."
John Cleese: "Noam Chomsky." --January 20, 1997 [77]

"In a recent British magazine poll, MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky
was named the world's top public intellectual. Can you imagine being named
that? That'd be wonderful, yes. Absolutely. And if I was the world's top
public intellectual, you folks could all kiss my ass." --David Letterman,
October 19, 2005 [78]


=Linguists=

"What he does in linguistics is exactly what he campaigns against in
politics. He feeds off people. He doesn't allow anyone to disagree with
him." --George Lakoff, April 27, 1995 [79]

"The most striking fact is how consistently people with anything at all to
say about language feel the need to strike some attitude for or against
Chomsky's ideas. It's a big problem." --David Pesetsky, November 1995 [80]

"Chomsky revived ideas that really had been kind of dormant since the
Enlightenment of what is a human like and how does that tie in to our
political arrangements, and the way we conceptualize humans in the broadest
sense." --Steven Pinker, September 25, 2003 [81]

"Chomsky's triumphalistic rhetoric is inversely proportional to the actual
empirical results that he can point to." --Frederick Newmeyer, 2003 [82]

Assman

Who the **** is going to read all of that?

Dewby

Are you crazy? That's way too long for me to care.

In Word, it's 72 pages long

MalevolentMaster

There's probably some paragraph in the middle of that that goes "N-Philes are losers lolz" or something to that effect.

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Crunchy

You gotta be ****ing me? Who on N-Philes would read all that?

Jay

johnlucas, you fail at life because you posted all of that

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MrSnuggles

you probably like george galloway too, another whacked out leftist that supports hezbollah.

Assman

Wasn't he on Big Brother?

Keazu

Dumb.







(It had to be done.)

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Brawl- 2320-5856-7241

Advance

I'd ban you for that if I could, douche.

__________________

What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?

johnlucas

Sorry for the messed up tags.
Tried to correct them but a 500 error came up & I had to wait to fix it.

Reading about that mess over in the Middle East, seeing a message board linked to a quote from Chomsky on the cause of this incident & learning more about the guy as a result inspired this post.

The guy makes a LOT of sense.
So much so that I'm surprised the U.S. government hasn't deported him yet. Being a bit below the radar in mass public consciousness must be saving his neck.

I coulda posted a quote or two or just left a link but I thought it would be better for everyone to see the words for themselves firsthand. Lots of well-thought-out commentary from that guy on matters of the world.

John Lucas

Game Guru

__________________

Caster13

I do, but it's just not the reason I come to these forums.

__________________
"I have captured the enemy for meat testing! Praise me! PRAISE ME!!!" -GIR
Wi-Fi ID: 1627 8934 4983 8539

Keazu

I guess some people just don't take an extra five seconds of scrolling as seriously as you do.

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Brawl- 2320-5856-7241

MalevolentMaster

You could have posted some of them and left a link so that we could read some and click if we were interested rather than posting ten thousand so that we would read none of them.

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Paul Weller

I love Noam Chomsky and I applaud you for posting that. I about half of it (The ones tI found interesting)

__________________
We're all just hapless victims of knowledge and learning and such
The man you thought you licked 'em but you choked in the clutch
Brent Black, you said it yourself it's an ethereal kind of flu
A Mac virus reveals the plot of the fiendish Fu Man Chu

MrSnuggles

noam "hezzbollah" chomsky? you love THAT guy?

Caster13

Out of curiosity, could you perhaps maybe link to something that shows something that would explain why you think Chomsky supports Hezzbollah?

__________________
"I have captured the enemy for meat testing! Praise me! PRAISE ME!!!" -GIR
Wi-Fi ID: 1627 8934 4983 8539

Paul Weller

Chomsky isn't afraid to get deep down with cynicism.

__________________
We're all just hapless victims of knowledge and learning and such
The man you thought you licked 'em but you choked in the clutch
Brent Black, you said it yourself it's an ethereal kind of flu
A Mac virus reveals the plot of the fiendish Fu Man Chu