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Chomsky: The Draft
Blog Post, December, 16 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
My guess is that the Bush administration planners will not call for a draft. The military command, and the civilian leadership, learned an important lesson in Vietnam: you can't expect a citizen's army to fight a vicious, brutal colonial war. ...
Chomsky: State Terror v.s. Resistance
Blog Post, December, 06 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Of course, the sentiment will seem outlandish to those who take it for granted that we are entirely justified in grinding people under our jackboot, using violence to impose conditions in which the resources of a country are freely open to exploit...
Chomsky: Speculation on Occupation
Blog Post, December, 06 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Will the effort succeed? I certainly have no basis for predicting, if only because I've been wrong about this all along. My guess was that the "war" would take a few days. To my surprise, it lasted much longer, so much so that in the first few...
Chomsky: Capitalism, an innovative and viable system?
Blog Post, December, 06 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
First, nothing remotely like capitalism exists. Is the US economy, relying crucially on the dynamic state sector, a capitalist economy? But putting that aside, was it an argument in the 18th century to say that feudalism, absolutism, rule by King...
Chomsky: Striking Iran
Blog Post, December, 01 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
My guess is that the US will not attack Iran, either directly or via Israeli mercenary pilots flying US aircraft (which would be called an Israeli attack). We do know that in the past year the US has provided over 100 advanced jet bombers to Is...
Chomsky: Some election comments...
Blog Post, November, 09 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
We have a fairly clear idea of what [Bush's] planners want, but what we can expect depends on circumstances, including those we create. That's what should concern us, not speculating about what we cannot know. The outcome was a disappointment...
Chomsky: The U.S., Brazil, & the Security Council
Blog Post, October, 28 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The question why the US has been mildly supportive of Brazil as a new permanent member of the Security Council, despite its left-leaning government, is a good one. We can only speculate, of course. My speculation is along these lines. It is no...
Chomsky: How to Fight Terrorists
Blog Post, October, 28 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
In the case of crimes, the first steps are (1) determining who was probably guilty, apprehending them, and bringing them to a fair trial; and (2) attending to the background circumstances, and where there are legitimate grievances in the backgroun...
Chomsky: Myth of the Liberal Media
Blog Post, October, 28 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The media delight in being portrayed as "adversarial," sometimes even going overboard in their efforts to subvert power. There are some remarkable examples, e.g., the Freedom House study of how the liberal crusading press lost the Vietnam war by ...
Chomsky: The Oil for Food Scandal
Blog Post, October, 28 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Long-time New York Times and Wall St Journal Middle East correspondent Youssef Ibrahim, who is quite knowledgeable, recently wrote that a large part of current revenues from oil are being siphoned off by the Allawi government and other Iraqi offic...
Chomsky: Replying to Nader
Blog Post, October, 12 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
[Nader wrote a response to a letter many, including Chomsky, signed. Noam was asked his reactions to Nader's criticisms of the letter and its authors.] The letter [Nader 2000 Leaders Organize To Defeat Bush](http://www.vote2stopbush.com) very bri...
Chomsky: Optimism since The Fateful Triangle?
Blog Post, October, 12 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
What's happened since 1982 (when I wrote The Fateful Triangle) is a mixed story. Some of it is reviewed in the extended updated edition. In some respects, there has been some progress. Official Israeli policy in 1989 (a coalition government, Lab...
Chomsky: Systems of Power and their Human Costs
Blog Post, October, 12 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
In dealing with enemies (say, Pol Pot, or Maoist China), we properly attribute to them deaths caused by starvation, disease, overwork, etc., insofar as these result from institutional structures and political choices. That's quite independent of i...
Chomsky: People of Afghanistan
Blog Post, October, 05 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
In mid-September, the NYT reported that the US was ordering Pakistan to restrict food shipments, at a time when they also reported that about 5 million were facing a grave threat of starvation (the NYT reported a month later that the number had ri...
Chomsky: Bush or Kerry?
Blog Post, October, 05 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
We should not be caught up in the massive propaganda campaign to focus attention, laser-like, on quadrennial personalized extravaganzas as if that constitutes democratic politics. As I wrote in my one comment about this, a web post at Znet man...
Chomsky: Revenge in Fallujah
Blog Post, October, 05 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
A few weeks ago there was a well-reported incident in which a Marine commander who opposed both the attack and the later withdrawal from Fallujah described it with the words "revenge" operation (he didn't call it a massacre). I didn't clip it, bu...
Chomsky: A Personal Statement RE Z/ZNet
Blog Post, September, 27 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
"We live in an era of media concentration, vast efforts on many fronts (political, economic, military, ideological) to insulate state and private power from critical discussion or even popular awareness, and to reduce citizens to isolated atomized...
Chomsky: Bombing Cambodia
Blog Post, September, 21 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The US was bombing South Vietnam very intensively from the early 60s, and many people, and South Vietnamese resistance forces, fled to border areas, sometimes spilling over to border areas of Cambodia. So in that sense there were "VC installati...
Chomsky: Fascism
Blog Post, September, 21 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The term "fascism," like terms of political discourse generally, is used in a great variety of ways and has no clear and explicit meaning. Mussolini's Fascism, the first explicit one, was a kind of state-corporatism, which crushed labor and dest...
Chomsky: Bush & Kerry Differences
Blog Post, September, 20 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The most uncontroversial differences have to do with the large majority of the population of the United States. For example, those who will have to bear the burdens of essentially freeing the rich from taxes and other social responsibilities. Or o...
