Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928 - ) is an American linguist and political analyst.

Sourced

• "There are no conservatives in the United States."
  • Source: On US Military Budgets, America's Defense Monitor and the Center for Defense Information, February 11, 1996
• "The U.S. media are alone in that it is — you must meet the condition of concision. You gotta say things between two commercials or in six hundred words. And that's a very important fact, because the beauty of concision — you know, saying a couple of sentences between two commercials — the beauty of that is you can only repeat conventional thoughts." Georgetown University, Washington DC
• "Q: Someone reading this interview may say, "Chomsky has all this command of facts and history. But what do I do as an individual?" How would you respond to that?

Chomsky: The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.

If you think that the general thrust of it is correct, there should be no problem in doing something about it. We're not going to be thrown into prison and face torture. We're not going to get assassinated. We have enormous privilege. We have tremendous freedom. That means endless opportunities.

I should tell you that every night I get many letters, and after every talk I get many questions from people who say, "I want to change things. What can I do?" I never hear these questions from peasants in southern Colombia or Kurds in southeastern Turkey under miserable repression or anybody who is suffering. They don't ask what they can do; they tell you what they're doing.

Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.

But that's not the kind of answer that people want. The answer that they want, I think, in the back of their minds is, what can I do that will be quick and easy and bring about an end to these problems? They remind me of Columbia students whom I used to argue with back in 1968, who literally thought, "Look, we're sitting in the president's office for a couple of weeks. After that, it's all going to be peace and love." Or people who say, "I went to a demonstration, and it's the same as it was before. Fifteen million people marched in the streets on February 15, and the war went on. It's hopeless."

That's not the way things work. If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes." [1]

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 willingess 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." From a talk entitled "Necessary Illusions" at MIT, May 10, 1989

On war crimes

• "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."
  • Source: unclear [2] [3] [4]
• "... you have to ask yourself what was called a "war crime"? How did they decide what was a war crime at Nuremberg and Tokyo? And the answer is pretty simple, and not very pleasant. There was a criterion. Kind of like an operational criterion. If the enemy had done it and couldn't show that we had done it, then it was a war crime. So like bombing of urban concentrations was not concidered a war crime because we had done it more than the Germans and Japanese. ... Bombing Dresden is not a war crime because we did it."

From a talk at St. Michael's College, Winooski, Vermont (available from Radio Free Maine and Turning the Tide Video) See also The Yale Law Journal "Review symposiom: War Crimes, the Rule of Force in International Affairs," Vol. 80, #7, June 1971 (Apparently not available on-line)

On terrorism

A U.S. Army manual on countering the plague [of international terrorism] defines terrorism as "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals which are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear"...

LIC [Low Intensity Conflict] is the doctrine to which the United States in officially committed and which has proven its worth in preventing successful independent development in Nicaragua, though it faltered in El Salvador despite its awesome toll. It must be emphasized that LIC... is hardly more than a euphemism for international terrorism, that is, reliance on force that does not reach the level of the war crime of aggression, which falls under the judgment of Nuremberg.

There are many terrorsit states in the world, but the United States in unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism, and on a scale that puts rivals to shame... Necessary Illusions, pages 271-273

• "One simple criterion is that if some action is legitimate for us, then it is legitimate for others."
  • Source: "The Enormous Impact of State-Directed International Terrorism (3 July 2002)" in "Language and Politics" Second Edition (Edited by C.P. Otero)

On control of society

• "[In] Democratic societies ... the state can't control behavior by force. It can to some extent, but it's much more limited in its capacity to control by force. Therefore, it has to control what you think. ... One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate."
  • Source: Chronicles of Dissent, Propaganda in the US vs in the USSR, October 24, 1986

On the media

• "The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus."
  • Source: Chronicles of Dissent, Non-Conspiracy Analysis of Propaganda System, October 24, 1986
• "The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."
  • Source: Necessary Illusions, Chapter 1: Democracy and the Media, 1989
• "It is worthy of note that with all the talk of liberal free trade policies, the two major sectors of the U.S. economy that remain competitive in world trade -- high-technology industry and capital-intensive agriculture -- both rely heavily on state subsidy and a state-guaranteed market."
  • Source: Necessary Illusions, Chapter 2: Containing the Enemy, 1989
• "I don't know much about Russian public opinion, but I imagine if you picked a man off the street, he would be surprised to hear a reference to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. They're defending Afghanistan against capitalist plots and bandits supported by the CIA and so on. But I don't think he'd find it difficult to understand that the United States invaded Vietnam." The Chomsky Reader pg 34

On sloganeering

• "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's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."
  • Source: WBAI interview, January, 1992
• "To be an intellectual is a vocation for anybody: it means using your mind and applying it to issues of human significance. Some people are privileged, powerful and usually conformist enough that they can make their way into the public arena. That doesn't make them any more intellectual than a taxi driver who happens to be thinking about the same things and may be much smarter and much more understanding of them. It's a question of power."
  • Source: CommonSense interview, May 3, 2002

On the Iraq conflict

• "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. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations."
  • Source: Telling the Truth about Imperialism, International Socialist Review, November-December, 2003
• "For people who believe in conspiracies, there's one sitting there waiting for them. Here's one for your favourite conspiracy theorist. In case anybody misunderstands, I don't believe this for one moment, but it's the kind of thing that goes around: How can we undermine and destroy all of these popular movements? Let's send them off on some crazy wild goose chase which is going to involve them in extremely detailed analysis and microanalysis and discussion of things that don't matter."
  • Source: Quoted, Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics, Verso, 1995, p. 182