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Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor of linguistics, human rights activist, and political analyst.
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On politics and economics
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- " "Tough love" is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else."
- "A lot of the people who call themselves Left I would regard as proto-fascists."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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 initative 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
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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?"
On education
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much." (context: João Goulart )
On media and propaganda
- "[...] 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."
- "[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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba is stable, but that’s not called stability."
- "Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "[...] 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 [...]"
On wars, invasions, and terrorism
- "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."
- "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."
- "[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 (see also: wikipedia:Just war)
- "[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. [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."
Vietnam War
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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." "
- "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."
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."
- "[...] the Iraq slaughter, misnamed war [...]"
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
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."
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."
- "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."
- "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 pointed. That’s new. Radically new."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
- "Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism."
- "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."
2003 invasion of Iraq
- "[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 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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
On war crimes
- "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."
- "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."
- "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-"
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, and that's the only likely kind of war, I’m not talking about the militarization of space and that kind of thing, I mean ground wars, it ought to be a citizens' army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military."
- "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."
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 [...]"
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."
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."
France
- "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? [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."
- "In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion -- a minimal respect for facts and logic -- has been virtually abandoned."
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."
- "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."
- "[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."
- "[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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
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."
United States
- "[..] 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
- "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."
- "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."
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 someting. 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."
- "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."
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."
On intelligence agencies
- "[...] 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. [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. [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
- "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
On drugs
- "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. [crosstalk] 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
- "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."
- "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."
On sports
- "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."
On religion
- "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."
- "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."
On moral responsibility
- Regarding malnutrition in Brazil: "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
On artificial intelligence
- "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."
- "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."
About Chomsky
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/The New York Times , February 25, 1979 [1]
- "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 [2]
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 [3]
- "[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 [4]
- "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 [5]
- "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 [6]
- "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 [7]
- "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 [8]
- "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 [9]
- "When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive." --Arundhati Roy , August 24, 2003 [10]
- "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 [11]
- "[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 [12]
Political writers (liberals)
- "[Noam Chomsky] seems to feel licensed to forget or distort the truth whenever it suits his polemical convenience. He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook." --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. , December 1969 [13]
- "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 [14]
- "[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 [15]
- "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 [16]
- "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 [17]
- "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 [18]
- "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 [19]
- "For leftists like me who had long considered Chomsky as our own beacon of moral clarity, it is hard to say which development is more catastrophic: the fact that Chomsky-bashing has become a major political pastime, or the fact that Chomsky has become so very difficult to defend. Chomsky's response to the war in Afghanistan offered a repellent mix of hysteria and hauteur, as in this early interview: "The U.S. has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand." By the same token, we can learn a great deal about the moral level of the antiwar left by observing its willingness to debate claims like these; over the past year, unfortunately, Chomsky and his followers have demonstrated rather little capacity for self-criticism. It is not permissible, apparently, to argue that Chomsky was right about Vietnam, Nicaragua, and East Timor but wrong about Afghanistan; those who fail to acknowledge Chomsky's infallibility about Afghanistan are guilty of thought-crime or conservatism, whichever is worse." --Michael Berube, September 15, 2002 [20]
- "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 [21]
- "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 [22]
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 [23]
- "Noam Chomsky: He's really an interventionist - and also completely clueless." --Justin Raimondo , January 18, 2002 [24]
- Regarding the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory bombing death toll: "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 fucked. You’re fucked twice.” --Christopher Hitchens , May 2002 [25]
- "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 [26]
- "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
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