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Chomsky: The Vietnam "Virus"
Blog Post, March, 01 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The issue that concerned planners from the 1950s was the usual one: independent nationalism in Vietnam might prove successful in terms meaningful to others in the region facing similar problems, and the "virus" might spread, "infecting" others, in...
Chomsky: Motivations for Terror
Blog Post, February, 16 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
It's certainly necessary to make distinctions, and to try to understand motivations -- not just of Palestinian suicide bombers, and bin Laden, but also of the communities from which they come and who they are addressing. On motivations, grievance...
Chomsky: US-Israel Strategic Relations
Blog Post, February, 16 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
...There are real US-Israel conflicts, but they are not being reported in the US (they are in Israel). An important one right now is the conflict over Israel's efforts to sell advanced military technology to China (Harpy drones), to which the US i...
Chomsky: Serb Massacres & NATO Intervention
Blog Post, February, 16 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
In Nov. 2004, the Bosnian Serb Republic issued a detailed document estimating the number missing as close to 8000, and apologized for the killing of thousands by the Serb forces. That is standardly misreported... The massacre, whatever its scal...
Chomsky: Iraq's Election
Blog Post, February, 07 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
In many respects, the elections were successful. The main success, however, is being mentioned only marginally, by a few reporters: the US was compelled to allow them to take place. That is a real triumph of non-violent resistance, for which S...
Chomsky: Oil for Food Farce
Blog Post, February, 07 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
I presume the main motivation is to make sure that no one pays attention to the real scandal: that the US-imposed sanctions slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, devastated the society, compelled the population to rely on Saddam Hussein for...
Chomsky: Rattling Iran
Blog Post, February, 04 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
About US plans, we can, of course, only speculate. We do know that the US has been advertising threats to Iran very openly, for some time. What's called "the Israeli air force" might more accurately be called a US air force with Israeli pilots...
Chomsky: The "Salvadoran Option"
Blog Post, February, 04 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The "Salvadoran option" means not just assassination squads, as announced, but mass murder -- facts about US operations in El Salvador that are kept in the dark, as is the truth about the 1984 Salvadoran election that is now touted as the grand mo...
Chomsky: India on the Edge of Survival
Blog Post, January, 31 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
[T]he dramatic rise in suicides in Andhra Pradesh, which have become a huge scandal....are particularly striking because they are so close to the jewels of the Indian economy, the high tech IT centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad, which evoke paroxy...
Chomsky: The Use of Force
Blog Post, January, 31 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The use of force always bears a heavy burden of proof, but I think it can sometimes be met. When? No one can give a general answer to that. There are some approaches, for example, by the most important UN resolution condemning terrorism in all...
Chomsky: Control of Oil & World Power
Blog Post, January, 18 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Japan and Europe have been working hard to achieve a measure of energy independence for a long time, ever since they had the opportunity. Japan has had long-standing relations with Iranian oil production, and got a multi-billion dollar contrac...
Chomsky: American Empire from the 1940's to today
Blog Post, January, 18 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
US power peaked in the late 1940s, when it had half the wealth of the world and unmatched control over international institutions, trade, etc. It's been declining ever since. By 1970, the world was becoming "tripolar," with three major economic...
Chomsky: Israel's Strategic Thinking
Blog Post, January, 11 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
For some time, the right wing has been warning that if Israel is to deal with the "demographic problem" -- too many non-Jews in a Jewish state -- it is either going to have to expel the Arab population, which is regarded as unfeasible (except inso...
Chomsky: American Fundamentalism
Blog Post, January, 05 2005
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
There are studies, often, asking people whether religious beliefs are "very important" to them, how often they attend religious services, etc. There are also interesting studies relating intensity of religious belief (by such measures) with econom...
Chomsky: More on the Draft
Blog Post, December, 27 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
One is the system that the military preferred after the debacle with a citizen's army in Vietnam, the first time an imperial power used a citizen's army to fight a colonial war: what's called a "volunteer army," which in effect amounts mostly to a...
Chomsky: Freedom: a moral hypothesis
Blog Post, December, 27 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Is it a claim, or a thesis that is put forth as a kind of null hypothesis -- something that it is morally right to accept unless there is evidence against it? I think the latter. Thus take a debate about slavery, or women's rights. If Jones c...
Chomsky: Public Expense & Private Profit
Blog Post, December, 27 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
For computers, the period from development to commercially viable sales was about 30 years (depending on how you count). For the internet, it was also about 30 years within the state system before it was handed over, by a process that remains obs...
Chomsky: Bakunin, the death penalty & seeds of the future
Blog Post, December, 20 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Bakunin's point was, I think, pretty simple. Within the larger society, it is possible to build structures that capture hopes for the future. For example, free schools, or self-managed cooperatives (like South End press, or worker-run factories ...
Chomsky: Vietnam then, Iraq today
Blog Post, December, 20 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
We can learn a lot from what happened in Vietnam. Protest was very slow in developing. By the time it reached a significant scale in 1967, the highly respected (and rather hawkish) military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall was won...
Chomsky: US-UK relations
Blog Post, December, 16 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The general contours are pretty clear. The US effectively displaced Britain as world-dominant power during World War II, quite consciously -- there were mini-wars going on right through the conflict, and they continued afterwards, often in ugly w...
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...
