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It Happened: The First 9/11, It Happened On September 11, 1973, In Chile. We Did It. Was That Interfering Or Hacking A Party? This Record Is All Over The World, Constantly Overthrowing Governments, Invading, Forcing People To Follow What We Call Democracy, As In The Cases I Mentioned. As I Say, If Every Charge Is Accurate, It's A Joke, And I'm Sure Half The World Is Collapsing In Laughter About This, Because People Outside The United States Know It. You Don't Have To Tell People In Chile About The First 9/11.

-Noam Chomsky

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It Happened: The First

Noam Chomsky

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It Happened: The First 9/11, It Happened On September 11, 1973, In Chile. We Did It. Was That Interfering Or Hacking A Party? This Record Is All Over The World, Constantly Overthrowing Governments, Invading, Forcing People To Follow What We Call Democracy, As In The Cases I Mentioned. As I Say, If Every Charge Is Accurate, It's A Joke, And I'm Sure Half The World Is Collapsing In Laughter About This, Because People Outside The United States Know It. You Don't Have To Tell People In Chile About The First 9/11.

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So Marxism, Freudianism: Any One Of These Things I Think Is An Irrational Cult. They're Theology, So They're Whatever You Think Of Theology; I Don't Think Much Of It. In Fact, In My View That's Exactly The Right Analogy: Notions Like Marxism And Freudianism Belong To The History Of Organized Religion.

If Scientists And Scholars Were To Become "collectively Self-organised And Consciously Activist" Today, They Would Probably Devote Themselves To Service To State And Private Power. Those Who Have Different Goals Should (and Do) Become Organized And Activist.

The Internet Could Be A Very Positive Step Towards Education, Organisation And Participation In A Meaningful Society.

States Are Not Moral Agents.

Orwell Says Straight, Look, In England What Comes Out In A Free Country Is Not Very Different From This Totalitarian Monster That I'm Describing In The Book. It's More Or Less The Same. How Come In A Free Country? He Has Two Sentences, Which Are Pretty Accurate. One, He Says, The Press Is Owned By Wealthy Men Who Have Every Reason Not To Want Certain Ideas To Be Expressed. And Second - And I Think This Is Much More Important - A Good Education Instills In You The Intuitive Understanding That There Are Certain Things It Just Wouldn't Do To Say.

I Don't Claim To Know A Lot About Mexico, But I Did Talk To Quite A Number Of Left Mexican Intelectuals, And They All Said The Same Thing. That There's A Lot Of Popular, Kind Of, Concern And Activism, But It Is Very Fragmented. That The Groups Have Very Specific, Narrow Agendas And They Don't Interact And Cooperate With One Another. Ok, That's Something You Have To Overcome To Build A Mass Popular Movement. And That's, Media Can Help, But They Also Benefit From It.

Destruction Of The Environment Is Not Only Rational; It's Exactly What You're Taught To Do In College.

When Leaders Carry Out Policies For Decades That Have No Consequences For The Stated Goal And Are Very Costly, You Have To Ask Whether They Are Telling You The Truth Or Whether The Policies Are For A Different Goal, Because They Are Not Reducing Drug Use.

Science Is A Bit Like The Joke About The Drunk Who Is Looking Under A Lamppost For A Key That He Has Lost On The Other Side Of The Street, Because That's Where The Light Is. It Has No Other Choice.

The United States Is Alone Among All The Countries In That It Does Not Permit Us Military Forces To Be Under Any Threat. Other Countries Are Willing To Have Forces In Peace-keeping Operations Where They Sometimes Are Under Threat, But The Us Is Not Willing To Do That.

Passivity May Be The Easy Course, But It Is Hardly The Honorable One.

My Feeling Is That A Human Being Or Any Complex Organism Has A System Of Cognitive Structures That Develop Much In The Way The Physical Organs Of The Body Develop. That Is, In Their Fundamental Character They Are Innate; Their Basic Form Is Determined By The Genetic Structure Of The Organism. Of Course, They Grow Under Particular Environmental Conditions, Assuming A Specific Form That Admits Of Some Variation. Much Of What Is Distinctive Among Human Beings Is A Specific Manner In Which A Variety Of Shared Cognitive Structures Develop.

Optimism Is A Strategy For Making A Better Future. Because Unless You Believe That The Future Can Be Better, It’s Unlikely You Will Step Up And Take Responsibility For Making It So. If You Assume That There’s No Hope, You Guarantee That There Will Be No Hope. If You Assume That There Is An Instinct For Freedom, There Are Opportunities To Change Things, There’s A Chance You May Contribute To Making A Better World. The Choice Is Yours.

It Is Only Natural To Expect That Guilds Will Tend To "protect Their Turf" And To Resist Challenge.

If A Person Chooses Not To Be A Writer, Or Speaker, Then (by Definition) The Person Is Choosing Not To Be Engaged In An Effort,"to Bring The Truth About Matters Of Human Significance To An Audience That Can Do Something About Them," Apart, Perhaps, From Some Circle Of Immediate Associates.

The Government Has A Defect: It's Potentially Democratic. Corporations Have No Defect: They're Pure Tyrannies.

The Soviet Union Was Pretty Much What Lenin And Trotsky Said It Was.

People Are Interested In Authentic Long-term, Socialist Goals, Which Is Not What Is Usually Called Socialism. They Should Be Thinking Through Carefully How The Projected Society Should Work, But Not In Extensive Detail Because A Lot Of Things Just Have To Be Learned By Experiment And We Don't Know Enough To Plan Societies In Detail By Any Means. But, General Guidelines Could Be Worked Out And Many Of The Specific Problems Can Be Discussed. That Should Just Be Part Of People's Popular Consciousness. That's How A Transition To Socialism Could Take Place.

The Leading Student Of Business Propaganda, Australian Social Scientist Alex Carey, Argues Persuasively That “the 20th Century Has Been Characterized By Three Developments Of Great Political Importance: The Growth Of Democracy, The Growth Of Corporate Power, And The Growth Of Corporate Propaganda As A Means Of Protecting Corporate Power Against Democracy.

Democracies Have

The Rascal Multitude Are The Proper Targets Of The Mass Media And A Public Education System Geared To Obedience And Training In Needed Skills, Including The Skill Of Repeating Patriotic Slogans On Timely Occasions.

In Our Society, Real Power Does Not Happen To Lie In The Political System, It Lies In The Private Economy: That’s Where The Decisions Are Made About What’s Produced, How Much Is Produced, What’s Consumed, Where Investment Takes Place, Who Has Jobs, Who Controls The Resources, And So On And So Forth. And As Long As That Remains The Case, Changes Inside The Political System Can Make Some Difference-i Don’t Want To Say It’s Zero-but The Differences Are Going To Be Very Slight.

Peace Is Preferable To War. But It’s Not An Absolute Value, And So We Always Ask, “what Kind Of Peace?

Quite Generally, International Affairs Have More Than A Slight Resemblance To The Mafia. The Godfather Does Not Take It Lightly When He Is Crossed, Even By A Small Storekeeper.

Us Government Policies Are Continuing To Do Exactly The Same Thing [produce Terrorism]. Two Days After The Boston Marathon Bombings, There Was A Drone Strike In Yemen Attacking A Peaceful Village, Which Killed A Target Who Could Very Easily Have Been Apprehended. But Of Course It Is Just Easier To Terrorise People.

There's A Very Striking Fact About The Elections Which You Can't Miss If You Looked At The Red-and-blue Electoral Map The Next Day: It's The Same Political Landscape That You Saw During The Civil War - Nothing Much Has Changed Except The Party Names.

When Geologists Announced The Beginning Of A New Geological Epoch, The Anthropocene, Humans Destroying The Environment, One Of The Main Things They Pointed To Is The Use Of Plastics In The Earth.

Sectors Of Power Are Not Going To Favor The Flourishing Of Dissidence.

Nothing In These Abstract Economic Models Actually Works In The Real World. It Doesn't Matter How Many Footnotes They Put In, Or How Many Ways They Tinker Around The Edges. The Whole Enterprise Is Totally Rotten At The Core: It Has No Relation To Reality.

Economic Models

By That Time [1966], We Did Begin To Get Some Protests [against Vietnam War]. But Not From Liberal Intellectuals; They Never Opposed The War.

Those Of Us Lucky Enough To Have A Share Of Privilege In The More Free Societies Should Not Be Asking This Question, But Doing Something To Answer It.

Groupings Of People That Get Together, Think Things Through, Come Out To Plan And So On, Like Unions Or True Political Organizations, They've Disintegrated. And People Tend To Be Atomized - You Get Down To A Society Based On Social Units Based On An Atom - An Atomic Element - Which Is A Person And Their Computer. Not A Society That Is Going To Be Able To Function Freely And Democratically. The Tendency Is There; It Doesn't Have To Be, But Its Something To Worry About.

Because The 1979 Strike Against U.s. Steel In Youngstown, Ohio Was An Occupation - And Actually, That's A Model That Really Should Be Pursued Now.they Went On From Striking To Trying To Have The Workforce And The Communities Take Over The Abandoned Factories That U.s. Steel Was Dismantling.

In Fact, For The Majority Of The Population, Wages And Incomes Have Stagnated And Conditions Have Gotten Worse. So They Are Asking, "what Did I Do Wrong?" And The Answer That The Talk Show Host Is Giving Them Is Convincing, In It's Internal Logic. It's Saying, "what's Wrong Is The Rich Liberals Own Everything, Run Everything, They Don't Care About You; Therefore, Distrust Them" And So On.

Any Incident Could Instantly Blow Up. Both Sides [usa And Russia] Are Modernizing And Increasing Their Military Systems, Including Nuclear Systems.

The Old-fashioned Idea Is That Responsibility Falls Upon Those Who Borrow And Lend. Money Was Not Borrowed By Campesinos, Assembly Plant Workers, Or Slum-dwellers. The Mass Of The Population Gained Little From Borrowing, Indeed Often Suffered Grievously From Its Effects.

It's Not Radical Islam That Worries The Us -- It's Independence

If You Look At Say, England And Germany A Century Ago, Which Had The Most Advanced Navies Then, They Were Dealing With Extremely Tricky Technological Problems. Putting A Huge Gun On A Moving Platform And Ensuring That It Could Hit Another Moving Target Was One Of The Hardest Technical Problems Of The Early Twentieth Century.

A Fundamental Element Of Human Nature Is The Need For Creative Work, For Creative Inquiry, For Free Creation Without The Arbitrary Limiting Effects Of Coercive Institutions. A Decent Society Should Maximize The Possibilities For This Fundamental Human Characteristic To Be Realized.

When Nazi Emissaries Came To The United States, They Were Welcomed At Harvard.

Most Of Intellectuals Are False Prophets, Flatterers Of The Court. The Real Prophets Are The Exception And Treated Badly. How Badly They're Treated Depends On The Society. Like In Eastern Europe, They Were Treated Very Badly. In Latin America, They Were Slaughtered.

As A Tactic, Violence Is Absurd. No One Can Compete With The Government In Violence, And The Resort To Violence, Which Will Surely Fail, Will Simply Frighten And Alienate Some Who Can Be Reached, And Will Further Encourage The Ideologists And Administrators Of Forceful Repression.

Our Only Real Hope For Democracy Is That We Get The Money Out Of Politics Entirely And Establish A System Of Publicly Funded Elections.

We Have To Be Irrational And Vindictive, Because That's Going To Frighten People. And We Have To Maintain This For Years. And Then We'll Be Able To Carry Out The Actions That We Want To Carry Out.

Capitalism Would Self-destruct In No Time. So The Business Classes Have Always Demanded Strong, Straight Intervention To Protect The Society From The Destructive Effects Of Market Forces Because They Don't Want Everything Destroyed.

I Had Relatives In New York City Who I Stayed With. And In Those Days, The Area From Union Square Down Fourth Avenue Had Small Bookstores, Many Of Which Were Run By Spanish Immigrants Who'd Fled After [francisco] Franco's Victory. I Spent Time In Them, And Also In The Offices Of Freie Arbeiter Stimme (free Worker's Voice) With Anarchists. I Picked Up A Lot Of Material And Talked To People, And It Became A Major Influence.

I Suspect Most Likely That More Nazis Came To America. I Was A Student At Harvard During The Early 1950s. There Was Practically No Jewish Faculty There.

You Might Recall, Perhaps, That We Were Probably The Only Commentators To Rely On The Most Knowledgeable Source, State Department Intelligence.

One Can Contrive A Religious Motivation For Virtually Any Choice Of Action, From Commitment To The Highest Ideals To Support For The Most Horrendous Atrocities. In The Sacred Texts, We Can Find Uplifting Calls For Peace, Justice And Mercy, Along With The Most Genocidal Passages In The Literary Canon. Conscience Is Our Guide, Whatever Trappings We Might Choose To Clothe It In.

Human Language Appears To Be A Unique Phenomenon, Without Significant Analogue In The Animal World.

I Admire Ralph Nader And Denis Kucinich Very Much, And Insofar As They Bring Up Issues And Carry Out An Educational And Organisational Function - That's Important, And Fine, And I Support It.

I Have Trouble Reading Modern Hebrew. In The 1950s, I Could Read Anything. I Don't Know How Much Experience You've Had With Contemporary Hebrew. It's Quite Difficult.

I Think The Activism Of The 1960s Had A Very Definite Civilizing Effect On The Whole Society In All Kinds Of Ways. So Lots Of Things That By Now Are Almost Taken For Granted Were Heretical In The 1960s. We Had Anti-sodomy Laws Until Not Many Years Ago.

Why Not Stakeholder Action? There's No Economic Principal That Says That Management Should Be Responsive To Shareholders, In Fact You Can Read In Texts Of Business Economics That They Could Just As Well Have A System In Which The Management Is Responsible To Stakeholders.

We Have To Be A Little Cautious About Not Trying To Kill A Gnat With An Atom Bomb. The Performances Are So Utterly Absurd Regarding The "post-truth" Moment That The Proper Response Might Best Be Ridicule.

Free Markets Are Based On The Free Circulation Of Labor. If You Don't Have Free Circulation Of Labor, You Don't Have Free Markets.

I Don't Even Know If I Ever Knew - Some Sweatshop In Baltimore. I Knew With My Other Relatives - Some Of The Women Were In The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union And Men Were Shop Boys And Things Like That. I Happened To Be In Philadelphia, But The Family Was In New York. I Could See What The Union Was Doing For Them.it Really Saved Their Lives.

Those Who Wish To Change The World Should Have The Best Possible Understanding Of The World, Including What Is Revealed By The Sciences, Some Of Which They Might Be Able To Use For Their Purposes. That's Why Workers Education, Including Science And Mathematics, Has Commonly Been A Concern Of Left Intellectuals.

Take Any Country That Has Laws Against Hate Crimes, Inspiring Hatred And Genocide And So On. The First Thing They Would Do Is Ban The Old Testament. There's Nothing Like It In The Literary Canon That Exalts Genocide, To That Extent. And It's Not A Joke Either. Like Where I Live, New England, The People Who Liberated It From The Native Scourge Were Religious Fundamentalist Lunatics, Who Came Waving The Holy Book, Declaring Themselves To Be The Children Of Israel Who Are Killing The Amalekites, Like God Told Them.

The People I Find Most Impressive Are Generally Unknown At The Time Of Their Actions And Forgotten In History.

Fed And Electoral College Could Use Some Tinkering, But They Are Not The Source Of The Problems.

We [ With Edward Herman] Believe That The Empirical Evidence We Review There - And Elsewhere, In A Great Deal Of Joint And Separate Work - Lends Substantial Support To The Conclusions; Whether That Is True Is For Others To Judge.

Ontological Questions Are Generally Beside The Point, Hardly More Than A Form Of Harassment.

My Proposal Happens To Be Very Mainstream.

Democracy Is A Danger To Any Powerful Group.

It's Not A Matter Of Public Relations And Rhetorical Style But Of Actions. It's The Actions And Policies Under George W.bush Administration That Have Left The Us Government Remarkably Isolated, Feared And Often Hated To An Extent With No Historical Precedent.

Private Companies Can Make A Personal Profile, Direct You To Things - They Will Say - That You Would Be Interested In, But That's Their Choice Not Your Choice.

The 'free-floating Intellectual' May Occupy Himself With Problems Because Of Their Inherent Interest And Importance, Perhaps To Little Effect.

Small Changes Can Magnifiy. The Possibility Of Interpersonal Communication Has Increased Substantially With Contemporary Technology. But As Compared With The Major Changes, Which Were Long Ago, These Are Not Huge.

In My Experience At Least, The Large Public Universities Do Not Fall Behind In Fostering Creativity And Independence; Often The Contrary.

When Something Isn't Constantly Drummed-up By The Media, [people] Just Don't Know About It.

Nobody Can Successfully Defy The Master Of The Hemisphere [america], In Fact Of The World, Hence The Savagery.

Corporations Are Totalitarian Institutions. Board Of Directors At The Top Of Managers Give Orders, Everyone Follows Orders..... At The Very Bottom Of Command, If You Are Lucky You Can Rent Yourself To It And Get A Job , And If You Are Sufficiently Propagandized You May Even Buy Some Of The Junk They Produce And So On.

Iceland Is Capitalist Social Democratic, Rather Like The Nordic Countries Generally. The Capital Had A Mayor Who Is An Anarchist, But The City Has Been Nothing Like That. In Fact A Few Years Ago It Was Super-neoliberal, Which Led To The Crash.

Roughly Speaking, I Think It's Accurate To Say That A Corporate Elite Of Managers And Owners Governs The Economy And The Political System As Well, At Least In Very Large Measure.

The Crimes Committed Against The People Of West Papua Are Some Of The Most Shameful Of The Past Years. The Western Powers Have Much To Answer For, And At The Very Least Should Use Their Ample Means To Bring About The Withdrawal Of The Occupying Indonesian Army And Termination Of The Shameful Exploitation Of Resources And Destruction Of The Environment And The Lives And Societies Of The People Of West Papua, Who Have Suffered Far Too Much.

Under Capitalism, We Can't Have Democracy By Definition. Capitalism Is A System In Which The Central Institutions Of Society Are In Principle Under Autocratic Control.

Blacks Have No Rights - In Fact They Were Three - Fifths Human According To The Constitution To Give Slave Owners More Voting Rights. So That's African Americans.

The Costs Of The Bush-obama Wars In Iraq And Afghanistan Are Now Estimated To Run As High As $4.4 Trillion - A Major Victory For Osama Bin Laden, Whose Announced Goal Was To Bankrupt America By Drawing It Into A Trap. The 2011 Military Budget - Almost Matching That Of The Rest Of The World Combined - Is Higher In Real Terms Than At Any Time Since World War Ii And Is Slated To Go Even Higher .

Independence Of Mind, Enthusiasm, Dedication To The Field, And Willingness To Challenge And Question And To Explore New Direction. There Are Plenty Of People Like That, But Schools Tend To Discourage Those Characteristics.

Syria Is Bad Enough, It's A Pretty Terrible Atrocity. But There Are Much Worse Ones In The World. So For Example, The Worst Atrocities In The Past Decade Have Been In The Congo, The Eastern Congo, Where Maybe 5 Million People Have Been Killed.

In America, The Professor Talks To The Mechanic. They Are In The Same Category.

Yes, And Syrians. There Is A Horrible Crisis There And The United States Has Admitted Virtually None Of The Refugees.

What Can Realistically Be Done Depends On The Historical Moment. The Same Is True With Regard To The Agents.

Suppose I Try To Say The Us Carries Out Terror, In Fact It's One Of The Leading Terrorist States In The World. You Can't Say That Between Commercials. People Rightly Want To Know What Do You Mean. They've Never Heard That Before. Then You Have To Explain. You Have To Give Background. That's Exactly What's Cut Out.

It Also Seems Beyond Controversy That Moral Responsibilities Are Greater To The Extent That People "have The Resources, The Training, The Facilities And Opportunities To Speak And Act Effectively."

There Has To Be Spiritual Transformation Among The Masses, Who Have To Be Willing To Recognize That Their Oppression Is Not A Law Of Nature. That's What Latin American Bishops Were Doing When They Formed Base Communities. They Were Trying To Get Peasants To Recognize That You Can Take Your Fate Into Your Own Hands. That's What The Civil-rights Movement Did Here. That's What The Women's Movement Did.

Take Germany And Japan, Both Defeated In The Second World War. Germany Has Acknowledged Its Monstrous Crimes To A Certain Extent, Has Paid Reparations And So On. Japan, In Contrast, Apologizes For Nothing And Has Paid No Reparations, With One Exception: It Pays Reparations To The United States, But Not To Asia.

We Use The Official Definitions Of Terrorism. The Definitions In The U.s. Code, In British Law, In U.s. Army Manuals And So On. And If You Use Those Definitions It Follows Instantly That The United States Is The Leading Terrorist State In The World.

Power Is Concentrated. The General Policy Is Exactly The Way That Adam Smith Described It: It's Designed For The Benefit Of Its Principal Architects, The Powerful. It Serves "the Vile Maxim Of The Masters: All For Ourselves And Nothing For Anyone Else". Those Are The Basic Rules Of The World.

The Invasion Of Panama, What Was That? The U.s. Killed, According To The Panamanians, 3,000 Civilians. Maybe They're Right. We Don't Investigate Our Own Crimes, So Nobody Knows.

Education Is Imposed Ignorance.

That's A Point That Dan Ellsberg Has Made For Years. He Said It's Kind Of Like If You And I Go Into A Grocery Store To Rob It, And I Have A Gun. The Guy May Give You The Money In The Cash Register. I'm Using The Gun Even If I Don't Shoot. Well That's Nuclear Weapons - Essential To Post-war Deterrence - They Cast A Shadow Over Everything.

It Is Now Well-known That The Taliban's Creation Was Facilitated By The Cia And The Isi As Part Of The 1980s Anti-soviet War.

In General, The Attitude Towards Nazi Germany Was Not That Hostile, Especially If You Look At The U.s. State Department Reports. In 1937 The State Department Was Describing Adolf Hitler As A "moderate" Who Was Holding Off The Forces Of The Right And The Left.

The Threat Is That The Public Will Know What The Government Is Up To. Any System Of Power Is Going To Want To Keep Free From Public Surveillance, That's Natural. Its Shouldn't Be But, Its Very Natural.

It's A Lesser-known Story, But The Japanese Government (after The Russian-nazi Pact, Which Split Poland) Did Allow Polish Jews To Come To Japan, With The Expectation That They Would Then Be Sent To The United States. But They Weren't Accepted, So They Stayed In Japan.

To Some Degree It Matters Who's In Office, But It Matters More How Much Pressure They're Under From The Public.

I Don't Think That The United States Cares. They Just Assume That North Korea Will Soon Have Nuclear Weapons.

The Dynamics Of The Taliban Now Appear To Be Very Different And Complex, In Both Afghanistan And Pakistan, As They Attack Governments And Mainstream Parties.

The U.s. Directed The War Against South Vietnam. There Was A Political Settlement In 1954. But In The Late '50's The United States Organized An Internal Repression In South Vietnam, Not Using Its Troops, But Using The Local Apparatus It Was Constructing. This Was A Very Significant And Very Effective Campaign Of Violence And Terrorism Against The Vietminh - Which Was The Communist-led Nationalist Force That Fought The French. And The Vietminh At That Time Was Adhering To The Geneva Accords, Hoping That The Political Settlement Would Work Out In South Vietnam.

The Invasion Of Iraq Was Simply A War Crime. Straight-out War Crime.

The American Claim That The Bombing Of North Vietnam Was Directed Against Military Targets Does Not Withstand Direct Investigation.

Those Who Had Demanded No More Than An End To The Bombing Of North Vietnam And A Commitment To Negotiations Saw Their Demands Being Realized, And Lapsed Into Silence.

Very Commonly Substances Are Criminalized Because They're Associated With What's Called The Dangerous Classes, You Know, Poor People, Or Working People.... Actually, The Peak Of Marijuana Use Was As I Said, In The Seventies, But That Was Rich Kids, So You Don't Throw Them In Jail. And Then It Got Seriously Criminalized, You Know, You Really Throw People In Jail For It, When It Was Poor People.

In The 1960s, Various Parts Of The Population Became Energized And Began To Enter The Public Arena To Call For The Rights Of Women, Students, Young People, Old People, Farmers And Workers. What Are Called "special Interests" - Meaning The Whole Population - They Began To Press To Enter The Public Arena. And They Said That Puts Too Much Pressure On The State And Therefore We Have To Have More Moderation In Democracy And They Should Go Back And Be Quiet And Obedient.

Well Before September 11, It Was Understood That With Modern Technology, The Rich And Powerful Will Lose Their Near Monopoly Of The Means Of Violence And Can Expect To Suffer Atrocities On Home Soil.

Government May Not Redistribute Private Wealth Or Grant Special Privileges To Any Individual Or Group.

Occupy Was Not A Movement, It Was A Tactic. You Can't Sit Forever In A Park Near Wall Street. You Can't Do It For More Than A Few Months. It Was A Tactic I Had Not Predicted. If People Asked Me, I Would Have Said "don't Do It." But It Was A Great Success, An Enormous Success, With A Big Impact On People's Thinking, On People's Actions.

Now Take A Look At The Way The Drug War Is Conducted Over The Past 40 Years. It Goes Back Farther, But Start From 40 Years Ago: There's Very Little Spent On Prevention And Treatment. There's A Lot On Policing, A Ton Of Stuff On Border Control And A Lot On Out-of-country Operations. And The Effect On The Availability Of Drugs Is Almost Undetectable; Drug Prices Don't Change On Measures Of Availability. So There Are Two Possibilities: Either Those Conducting The Drug War Are Lunatics, Or They Have Another Purpose.

France Has Not Been Able To Come To Terms With The Fact That It's Not A Major Power Anymore. I Mean Even Before The Second World War Paris Was One Of The Main Centers Of Intellectual And Cultural Life. But Now Paris Is A Kind Of Subsidiary Of Germany, Their Traditional Enemy And They Can't Come To Terms With It.

Physics And Those Parts Of Other Fields That Grow Out Of Physics - Chemistry, The Structure Of Big Molecules - In Those Domains, There Is A Lot Of Progress. In Many Other Domains, There Is Very Little Progress In Developing Real Scientific Understanding.

What Happened In The Following Years? Well, I Think That Among The Educated Classes It Stayed The Same. You Talk About Humanitarian Intervention, It's Like Vietnam Was A Humanitarian Intervention. Among The Public, It's Quite Different.

Either You Repeat The Same Conventional Doctrines Everybody Is Saying, Or Else You Say Something True, And It Will Sound Like It's From Neptune.

The Us And Israel Have Demanded Further That Palestinians Not Only Recognize Israel's Rights As A State In The International System, But That They Also Recognize Israel's Abstract Right To Exist, A Concept That Has No Place In International Law Or Diplomacy, And A Right Claimed By No One. In Effect, The Us And Israel Are Demanding That Palestinians . . . Formally Accept The Legitimacy Of Their Expulsion From Their Own Land. They Cannot Be Expected To Accept That, Just As Mexico Does Not Grant The Us The Right To Exist On Half Of Mexico's Territory, Gained By Conquest.

Bradley Manning Should Be Regarded As A Hero. He Is Doing What An Honest, Decent Citizen Should Be Doing: Letting Your Population Know What The Government, The People Who Rule You Are Doing. They Want To Keep It Secret Of Course.

Starting With [ronald] Regan It Became Quite Open, The Attack On Unions. It Wasn't The Pinkertons Anymore, But It Was Just Not Applying The Laws.

Some Innate Capacity - Some Part Of The Human Genetic Endowment - Enters Into Language Acquisition. That Much Is Uncontroversial Among Those Who Believe That Humans Are Part Of The Natural World. If It Were Not True, Would Be A Miracle That My Granddaughter Reflexively Identified Some Elements Of The Blooming Buzzing Confusion As Language-related And Went On To Acquire Capacities Of The Kind That You And I Are Now Exercising, While Her Pet Kitten (chimp, Songbird, Bee...), Presented With Exactly The Same Data, Could Not Take The First Step, Let Alone The Later Ones.

The Question In Brief, Is Whether Democracy And Freedom Are Values To Be Preserved Or Threats To Be Avoided . . . Democracy And Freedom Are More Than Values To Be Treasured; They May Well Be Essential To Survival.

If The Naacp Were To Impose A Control Of Something Towards All, Then I Would Staunchly Oppose It.

I Am Opposed To The Accumulation Of Executive Power Anywhere.

Executive Power

Libertarian Socialism Is Properly To Be Regarded As The Inheritor Of The Liberal Ideals Of The Enlightenment.

The Missile Defense Component Is A Minor Feature That Nobody Takes Very Seriously. Nobody Really Believes That The Us Is Trying To Protect Itself From North Korea. That's Not Serious. But The Militarization Of Space Is Quite Serious.

In The United States, And To A Certain Extent In Canada, There's Very Little Interest In What Happens Outside Their Borders.

Democracy, In Any Rational Form, Also Imposes Conditions On Majority Rule. That's What The Bill Of Rights Is About, For Example.

I Think There Are All Kinds Of Intrusions Into Private Rights That Make Use Of Contemporary Technology.

I'm Pretty Much Out Of Popular Culture Altogether.

Popular Culture

What's The Purpose Of Nato? Well Actually We Have An Official Answer. It Isn't Publicized Much, But A Couple Of Years Ago, The Secretary-general Of Nato Made A Formal Statement Explaining The Purpose Of Nato In The Post-cold War World Is To Control Global Energy Systems, Pipelines, And Sea Lanes. That Means It's A Global System And Of Course He Didn't Say It, It's An Intervention Force Under Us Command, As We've Seen In Case After Case. So That's Nato.

Every Single One Cabinet Appointment: Education, Environment, Labor - Every Single One Is Selected To Undermine Any Aspect Of Government That's Of Any Help To People, And That Doesn't Benefit The Super-rich. And It's Absolutely Systematic. The Interesting Question Will Be How Long Donald Trump's Constituency Can Fall For The Con Game.

To Use The Terms That Are Reserved For Official Enemies, It Is The Commissars And Apparatchiks, Not The Dissidents, Who Are Respected And Privileged Within Their Own Societies.

The Most Dramatic Case Is That Of The Central Americans. Why Are People Fleeing Central America? It's Because Of The Atrocities The U.s. Committed There. Take Boston, Where There's A Fairly Large Mayan Population. These People Are Fleeing From The Highlands Of Guatemala, Where There Was Virtual Genocide In The Early 1980s Backed By Ronald Reagan. The Region Was Devastated, And People Are Still Fleeing To This Day, Yet They're Sent Back.

Of Course, We [ With Edward Herman] Have A Purpose: Namely, To Encourage Readers To Undertake What Might Be Called "a Course In Intellectual Self-defense," And To Suggest Ways To Proceed; In Other Words, To Help People Undermine The Dedicated Efforts To "manufacture Consent" And To Turn Them Into Passive Objects Rather Than Agents Who Control Their Own Fate.

The Republican Primaries Were Quite Interesting. The Establishment Had Its Candidate, [mitt] Romney, A Kind Of A Wall Street Lawyer And Investor, And They Wanted Him In. But The Base Didn't Want Him.

We Do Not For Example Say That The Person Has A Perfect Knowledge Of Some Language L Similar To English But Still Different From It. What We Say Is That The Child Or Foreigner Has A 'partial Knowledge Of English' Or Is 'on His Or Her Way' Towards Acquiring Knowledge Of English, And If They Reach This Goal, They Will Then Know English.

There Is Little Doubt That A Significant Part Of Any Serious Solution Will Require Advances Of Technology, But That Can Only Be Part Of The Solution. Other Major Changes Are Necessary.

Goebbels Was In Favor Of Free Speech For Views He Liked. So Was Stalin. If You’re Really In Favor Of Free Speech, Then You’re In Favor Of Freedom Of Speech For Precisely The Views You Despise. Otherwise, You’re Not In Favor Of Free Speech.

Freedom Of Speech

If The Principle Is, "let's Not Get Lethal Substances Out To The Public", The First One You'd Go After Is Tobacco. The Next One You'd Go After Is Alcohol. Way Down The List You'd Get To Cocaine, And Sort Of Invisibly Low You'd Get To Marijuana.

I Choose To Live In What I Think Is The Greatest Country In The World, Which Is Committing Horrendous Terrorist Acts And Should Stop.

About Specific Social Issues, There Is A Great Deal To Say That Departs Very Far From Truism And Is, Accordingly, Significant And Controversial.

We Recriminalized Black Life. Incarceration Rates Since The 1908s Have Gone Through The Roof, Overwhelmingly Black Males, Women And Hispanics To Some Extent. Essentially Re-doing What Happened Under Reconstruction. That's The History Of African Americans - So How Can Any One Say There's No Problem. Sure, Racism Is Serious, But It's Worse Than That.

African American

A Lot Of The People Involved In The Media Are Very Serious, Honest People, And They Will Tell You, And I Think They Are Right, That They Are Not Being Forced To Write Anything.

As For Organs, Traits, Etc., Being "for" Something, The Notion May Be A Useful Shorthand, But Shouldn't Be Taken Too Seriously, If Only Because Of The Ubiquitous Phenomenon Of Exaptation.

I Think That In Order To Achieve Progress In The Study Of Language And Human Cognitive Faculties In General It Is Necessary First To Establish 'psychic Distance' From The 'mental Facts' To Which Köhler Referred, And Then To Explore The Possibilities For Developing Explanatory Theories... We Must Recognize That Even The Most Familiar Phenomena Require Explanation And That We Have No Privileged Access To The Underlying Mechanisms, No More So Than In Physiology Or Physics.

Actually, The Phrase "national Security" Is Barely Used Until The 1930s. And There's A Reason. By Then, The United States Was Beginning To Become Global. Before That The United States Had Been Mostly A Regional Power - Britain Was The Biggest Global Power. After The Second World War, National Security Is Everywhere, Because We Basically Owned The World, So Our Security Is Threatened Everywhere. Not Just On Our Borders, But Everywhere - So You Have To Have A Thousand Military Bases Around The World For "defense."

Workers And Their Families May Starve To Death In The New World Order Of Economic Rationality, But Diamond Necklaces Are Cheaper In Elegant New York Shops, Thanks To The Miracle Of The Market.

There Are Some Very General Ideas That People Can Keep In Mind; They're Kind Of Truisms. It's Only Worth Mentioning Them Because They're Always Denied.

I'm Into Eating As Little As Possible... I Never Cook. Never Use The Stove Or Anything.

The Us Reasserted Control Over Nicaragua In 1990. Since Then, The Country Has Experienced A Steep Decline. It's Now The Second Poorest Country In The Hemisphere.

I Would Feel No Hesitation In Saying That It Is The Responsibility Of A Decent Human Being To Give Assistance To A Child Who Is Being Attacked By A Rabid Dog, But I Would Not Intend This To Imply That In All Imaginable Circumstances One Must, Necessarily, Act In Accordance With This General Responsibility.

There's A Tremendous Amount Of Language Loss. Most Of The Attention Is Given To Indigenous Languages, Which Makes Sense, But Some Of The Most Dramatic Language Loss Is In Europe.

In Fact, A Rather Striking Aspect Of Business Propaganda In The United States Is The Demonization Of Government, Starting After The Second World War.

I Think It's Just Been A Core Part Of The Cuban Revolution To Have A Very High Level Of Internationalism. I Mean, These Cases You've Mentioned Are Cases In Point, But The Most Extreme Case Was The Liberation Of Africa. Take The Case Of Angola For Example, And There Are Real Connections Between Cuba And Angola-much Of The Cuban Population Comes From Angola.

Since James Madison Day (and Long Before), There Have Been Constant Struggles Over "democratic Governance".

The Communists Were Mainly Responsible For The Destruction Of The Spanish Anarchists. Not Just In Catalonia - The Communist Armies Mainly Destroyed The Collectives Elsewhere.

Bolivia Is A Striking Example. The Mostly White, Europeanized Elite, Which Is A Minority, Happens To Be Sitting On Most Of The Hydrocarbon Reserves. For The First Time Bolivia Is Becoming Democratic. So It's Therefore Bitterly Hated By The West, Which Despises Democracy, Because It's Much Too Dangerous.

I Suppose Frogs Pay No Attention To Being Frogs. They Take It For Granted. What Interests A Frog Are Differences Among Frogs. From Our Point Of View They Are More Or Less The Same, From Their Point Of View They Are All Radically Different.

The Great Soul Of Power Extends Far Beyond States, To Every Domain Of Life, From Families To International Affairs. And Throughout, Every Form Of Authority And Domination Bears A Severe Burden Of Proof. It Is Not Self-legitimizing. And When It Cannot Bear The Burden, As Is Commonly The Case, It Should Be Dismantled.

Burden Of Proof

Why Did The People Think [vietnam War] Was Fundamentally Wrong And Immoral? The Guys Who Ran The Polls, John E. Rielly, A Professor At The University Of Chicago, A Liberal Professor, He Said What That Means Is That People Thought Too Many Americans Had Being Killed. Another Possibility Is They Didn't Like The Fact That We Were Carrying Out The Worst Crime Since The Second World War. But That's So Inconceivable That Wasn't Even Offered As A Possible Reason.

Many Of The People Who Voted For Trump Were People Who Voted For Obama Eight Years Ago. You Remember, Of Course, His Message Was "hope And Change." People Wanted Change, For Good Reasons, And They Wanted Hope. Disillusioned With What Took Place, They Turned To Someone Else Who Was Offering Hope And Change. When They're Disillusioned With That, It Depends On What Activists And Others Do.

If We Choose, We Can Live In A World Of Comforting Illusion.

Sometimes The Former Forces Are In The Ascendance, And "democratic Governance" Is Eroded, Though Anyone Familiar With Intellectual History Would Expect That The Slogans Will Be Passionately Proclaimed As They Are Drained Of Substantive Content. We Happen To Be Living In Such An Era, But As Often Before, There Is No Reason To Suppose That The Process Is Irreversible.

Most Of The Population In America Is Disenfranchised. It Doesn't Matter What They Think. Just Look At The Passionate Rhetoric About How We Can't Stand By When A Country Uses Weapons To Kill Innocent Civilians.

While The State Can Coerce, With Some Exceptions (like North Korea) It Seems To Me Misleading To Think Of It As Capable Of "enslavement."

I Know Of People Whose Actions And Words I Admire And Respect. Some Are Called "intellectuals," Some Are Not.

The Book [manufacturing Consent] Itself Is Then Devoted To A Series Of Case Studies, Selected, We Hope [with Edward Herman], To Offer A Fair And In Fact Rather Severe Test Of Those Conclusions.

The Obvious One, In A Market System, In A Really Functioning One, Whoever's Making The Decisions Doesn't Pay Attention To What Are Called Externalities, Effects On Others. I Sell You A Car, If Our Eyes Are Open We'll Make A Good Deal For Ourselves But We're Not Asking How It's Going To Affect Her [over There.] It Will, There'll Be More Congestion, Gas Prices Will Go Up, There Will Be Environmental Effects And That Multiplies Over The Whole Population. Well, That's Very Serious.

One Of The Benefits Of A Properly Functioning Democracy Is Minority Rights And Majority Rule.

The Contradiction Is Somehow Unresolved. In The Case Of The Business Propaganda, It's Particularly Ironic Because While Business Wants The Population To Hate The Government, They Want The Population To Love The Government. Namely, They're In Favor Of A Very Powerful State Which Works In Their Interest.

Karl Marx Was In Favor Of Socialist And Communist-socialist Revolutions, But He Had A Pretty Nuanced View About It.

Before The 1970s, Banks Were Banks. They Did What Banks Were Supposed To Do In A State Capitalist Economy: They Took Unused Funds From Your Bank Account, For Example, And Transferred Them To Some Potentially Useful Purpose Like Helping A Family Buy A Home Or Send A Kid To College.

There Are Huge Areas Where The Human Mind Is Apparently Incapable Of Forming Sciences, Or At Least Has Not Done So. There Are Other Areas - So Far, In Fact, One Area Only [physics] - In Which We Have Demonstrated The Capacity For True Scientific Progress.

In The Sciences Particularly The Large Public Universities Must And Do Take An Active Role In Fostering Creativity And Independence; Otherwise The Fields Will Wither, And Along With Them Even The Aspirations Of Wealth And Power.

The Only Way We Can Put A Permanent End To Terrorism Is To Stop Participating In It.

Stability Means You Do What We Say, And What We Say Is That Colombia And The Resources Of The Andean Region Shall Be Freely Available To The Rich And Powerful Of The World, Particularly Us-based Multinational Corporations.

Pascal In His Bitter Rendition Of The Practices Of The Jesuit Intellectuals He Despised, Including Their Demonstration Of "the Utility Of Interpretation," A Device Of Manufacturing Consent Based On Reinterpretation Of Sacred Texts To Serve Wealth, Power, And Privilege.

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.

No One Is Concerned With Central America Anymore. If A Million People Are Facing Starvation In Northern Nicaragua And Honduras, It's None Of Our Business. Few People Even Recognize That This Situation Is In Part An Outgrowth Of Us Policies Going Back To The 1980's. Nobody Is Concerned Because Nicaragua Is Technically Stable.

There's A Very Committed Effort To Convert The Us Into Something Resembling A Third World Society, Where A Few People Have Enormous Wealth And A Lot Of Others Have No Security.

Suppose That, Say, China Established Military Bases In Colombia To Carry Out Chemical Warfare In Kentucky And North Carolina To Destroy This Lethal Crop [tobacco] That Is Killing Huge Numbers Of Chinese.

If A Child From An Amazonian Hunter-gatherer Tribe Comes To Boston, Is Raised In Boston, That Child Will Be Indistinguishable In Language Capacities From My Children Growing Up Here, And Vice Versa.

There Are By Now Declassified Documents From The 1950s That Tells You A Lot About What's Going On In Egypt And We Should Have Known It Then. It's About Exactly What's Happening, How We Can Disregard Public Opinion As Long As The Dictators We Support Are Capable Of Suppressing Their Populations. So To Hell With Public Opinion. That's All Right There In The 1950's. That's Not Security. That's Not Security Of The Government. That's, If Anything, Security From Its Own Population. And There's A Lot Of That.

Well, In Fact If You Look At The Trump Voters, You Take A Look At Their Attitudes It's Not All That Different. In Some Respects They're Similar. They're An Older Version Of The Sanders People. So A Lot Of It Is Racist And You Have That Sort Of Thing, But If You Look At Their Views On Say Health, Education, And So On, It's Kind Of The Same As Sanders.

Health Education

Take Google - I Can Use It, You Can Use It, Anyone Else Can Use It, But We All Know Its Designed So That Private Power Can Influence Significantly How You Access It.

There Is A Big Difference Between Tweeting To Your Friend About Something That Is Happening And Having A Real Personal Relationship With People.

The Main Mineral In Your Cellphone, Coltan [a Black Metallic Ore], Comes From The Eastern Congo. Multinational Corporations Are There Exploiting The Very Rich Mineral Resources Of The Region. A Lot Of Them Are Backing Militias Which Are Fighting One Other To Gain Control Of The Resources Or A Piece Of The Resources.

People Are Dangerous. If They're Able To Involve Themselves In Issues That Matter, They May Change The Distribution Of Power, To The Detriment Of Those Who Are Rich And Privileged.

Violence Can Succeed, As Americans Know Well From The Conquest Of The National Territory. But At Terrible Cost. It Can Also Provoke Violence In Response, And Often Does.

We Should Not Be Speaking To, But With. That Is Second Nature To Any Good Teacher.

I Grew Up In That, When I Was A Kid. My Friends And I Used To Play Cowboys And Indians. We Were Cowboys Killing The Indians, Following The Wild West Stories. All Of This Combined Into A Very Strange Culture, Which Is Frightened.

If You Want To End Terrorism Stop Participating In It.

If By 'intellectual' You Mean People Who Are A Special Class Who Are In The Business Of Imposing Thoughts And Forming Ideas For People In Power, And Telling People What They Should Believe...they're Really More A Kind Of Secular Priesthood, Whose Task It Is To Uphold The Doctrinal Truths Of The Society. And The Population Should Be Anti-intellectual In That Repect.

The Whole Educational And Professional Training System Is A Very Elaborate Filter, Which Just Weeds Out People Who Are Too Independent, And Who Think For Themselves, And Who Don't Know How To Be Submissive, And So On -- Because They're Dysfunctional To The Institutions.

Ever Since I've Had Any Political Awareness, I've Felt Either Alone Or Part Of A Tiny Minority.

There Is Still Much Debate About Whether Torture Has Been Effective In Eliciting Information - The Assumption Being, Apparently, That If It Is Effective, Then It May Be Justified.

Real Schools Ought To Provide People With Techniques Of Self-defense, But That Would Mean Teaching The Truth About The World And About The Society, And Schools Couldn't Survive Very Long If They Did That.

In Fact, It's Doing It All Over The World. Obama, First Of All, Is Running The Biggest Terrorist Operation That Exists, Maybe In History. The Drone Assassination Campaigns, Which Are Just Part Of It. All Of These Operations, They Are Terror Operations.

The United States Invaded Iraq To Gain Control Of One Of The Major Sources Of The World's Energy.

We're Supposed To Worship Adam Smith But You're Not Supposed To Read Him. That's Too Dangerous.

Whatever The Reasons May Be, I Was Very Much Affected By Events Of The 1930s - The Spanish Civil War, For Example, Though I Was Barely Literate.

I Think That The Real Tragedy Of Greece - Aside Of The Savagery Of European Bureaucracy, Brussels Bureaucracy And Northern Banks, Which Was Really Savage - Is That The Greek Crisis Didn't Have To Erupt. It Could Have Been Taken Care Of Pretty Easily At The Very Beginning. But It Happened And Syriza Came Into Office With A Declared Commitment To Combat It, And In Fact As I Recall They Actually Called A Referendum, Which Horrified Europe.

There Are Two Problems For Our Species' Survival - Nuclear War And Environmental Catastrophe - And We're Hurtling Towards Them. Knowingly.

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