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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...
Chomsky: Global Perception of the US Election:
Blog Post, September, 20 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
I doubt that most people abroad care whether Bush is an idiot, a trained actor, or a genius who is pulling all the strings. They care about the policies of his administration. That is what has led to the astonishing increase in fear and dislike of...
Chomsky: Civilizing Aristide
Blog Post, August, 23 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
My own judgment, for what it is worth, is that [Aristide] came into office committed to the kind of significant social and economic reform that was called for by his popular constituency in the hills and slums, desperately needed in Haiti. His ...
Chomsky: Attack on Democracy
Blog Post, August, 23 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The standard doctrine -- preached by Alan Greenspan, any number of economists, and commentators commonly -- that the marvellous "new economy" is a tribute to "entrepreneurial initiative," "consumer choice," and other free market wonders does not s...
Chomsky: Globalization
Blog Post, August, 15 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Used neutrally, the term "globalization" just refers to international integration. Virtually no one is opposed to that, certainly not the left or the workers movements, which from their modern origins have been committed to international solidar...
Chomsky: Refuting Horowitz and Collier
Blog Post, August, 11 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
To refute the criticisms[...] is trivial, and worth doing for only one reason. It teaches us something important: by even bothering to refute the criticisms, we are granting the critics a great gift, exactly what they want, and are falling into a ...
Chomsky: Moral Truisms
Blog Post, August, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
There is no doubt that people have moral intuitions, and research -- serious research is in very early stages -- reveals that they are quite uniform without experience in complex situations, and in many ways surprising. There is little reason t...
Chomsky: Controlling the Middle East
Blog Post, August, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Controlling the region means being in a position to have a significant effect of decisions that are taken there, particularly with regard to production levels, price range (not to high, not too low), distribution (e.g., where pipelines go), etc. N...
Chomsky: An Independent Iraq
Blog Post, July, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
For what it's worth, polls in Iraq reveal very considerable and apparently growing support for withdrawal of the US occupying army, apart from the Kurdish regions. That doesn't mean withdrawal tomorrow. No one is talking about that, and it isn't...
Chomsky: Peak Oil Theory
Blog Post, July, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The basic theory is incontrovertible. The only questions have to do with timing and cost. ... The date can be pushed back much farther if more costly (or maybe some to-be-discovered improved) technology is used. As for the estimates of cost, by r...
Chomsky: Iran's Threat
Blog Post, July, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The sharp increase in focus on Iran's alleged threat (nuclear weapons, connections to terror, etc.) is very clear. ... The same has been true with regard to Syria (including last December's "Syria Accountability Act" passed almost unanimously in ...
Chomsky: Invading Cuba
Blog Post, July, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Cuba was officially regarded as a security threat to the US until 1998, and when the Pentagon decided that maybe the US could survive a Cuban assault, the Clinton administration insisted that the threat must be defined as "negligible," but still r...
Chomsky: The Wall and Israel's Aims
Blog Post, July, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
If the goal were security, Israel would have built the fence a few km inside its borders. It could then be a mile high, patrolled on both sides by the IDF, mined with nuclear weapons, utterly impenetrable. Perfect security. The problem would be ...
Chomsky: Classified Documents
Blog Post, July, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
The scheduled release of declassified documents in the official State Department history is 30 years. In practice it is a bit longer, about 35 years or so usually. Of course, not everything is declassified. Sometimes it turns out on independent ...
Chomsky: India Today
Blog Post, June, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
It's important to bear in mind that there are two quite different Indias. There is the high tech India in Hyderabad, which Thomas Friedman raves about in his odes to "globalization" -- meaning, the neoliberal version of investor-rights-based int...
Chomsky: Turkey in the World
Blog Post, June, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Turkey's human rights record has been awful, though it has been improving, as commentators routinely point out. But that overlooks a rather important fact: Turkey's crimes against its own population, particularly Kurds, rely crucially on (1) massi...
Chomsky: The SU and the Arms Race
Blog Post, June, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Questioner: Given that the arms race was a disaster for the Soviet Union economically and of little advantage militarily, why did the USSR engage in it? What it did to them economically is exactly what Khrushchev predicted, and presumably what JF...
Chomsky: Iraq and Vietnam
Blog Post, June, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Personally, I don't see much useful analogy between Iraq and Vietnam. Vietnam was in a remote corner of the world that no one cared about very much, so the US could pound away at it, devastating four countries, with little international protest, ...
Chomsky: Saudi Puppet
Blog Post, June, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
It's often pointed out in the international relations literature that the notion "puppet" is not a simple one. Puppets can often influence the dominant power significantly. The Soviet satellites were certainly "puppets," if the term has any meanin...
Chomsky: The Reagan Phenomena
Blog Post, June, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
I believe this is the first such extravaganza in the US. ... There was something similar after the JFK assassination, but of course the assassination of a living president is quite different. I don't recall anything else remotely similar, perha...
Chomsky: Defeating Nazi...
Blog Post, June, 10 2004
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky's ZSpace page
Questioner: The U.S. opposed and defeated the Nazis and the Communists. Doesn't this evidence U.S. humanitarianism for the rest of the world? The "history" assumed in this argument is so radically and uncontroversially false that it is hard even ...
