Noam Chomsky

States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.

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

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

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

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

The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire, [...]

Chomsky’s triumphalistic rhetoric is inversely proportional to the actual empirical results that he can point to.

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.

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can't deal with them... But it's a complicated matter: Science studies what's at the edge of understanding, and what's at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated. In fact even understanding insects is an extremely complicated problem in the sciences. So the actual sciences tell us virtually nothing about human affairs.

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.

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.

"A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" in Language, 35, No. 1 (1959), 26-58. Summation by Noam Chomsky: Rereading this review after eight years, I find little of substance that I would change if I were to write it today. I am not aware of any theoretical or experimental work that challenges its conclusions; nor, so far as I know, has there been any attempt to meet the criticisms that are raised in the review or to show that they are erroneous or ill-founded.

China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.

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

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

Israeli musician, a pro-Palestinian activist at London University, says that burning of synagogues is "a rational act" in opposition to Israel. What is that? Radical-Leftism or neo-Nazism? Is it Noam Chomsky for advanced readers or Julius Streicher for dummies? But the precise correlation between anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism is of marginal importance.

The Left's spiritual leader, Noam Chomsky, went to Hezbollah – a murderous, extremist, nationalistic organization by its own leaders' account – and saluted. The fascism of the Left, like that of the Right, does not believe in the possibility of the righteousness of anyone else. They claim that there is only one truth. We have known this since the days when in front of the "Sun of the Nations" who murdered millions, people stood and said that the revolution there is also ours.

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

"I don’t even know what an atheist is. When people ask me if I’m an atheist, I have to ask them what they mean. What is it that I’m supposed to not believe in? Until you can answer that question I can’t tell you whether I’m an atheist, and the question doesn’t arise. [...] I don’t see how one can be an agnostic when one doesn’t know what it is that one is supposed to believe in, or reject.

No observation will cause one to be ejected from acceptable mainstream company more immediately than pointing out that what the U.S. Government is doing is "terrorism" by definition. Ask Noam Chomsky about that, if you can find him. That's because using Terrorist threats (or civilian-destroying violence) for political gain, or to keep a population in fear, is something that only other people do -- but never the United States -- even when it's as plain as day (as it is here) that the U.S. Government is doing exactly that.