Background Image

...

Judge Afiuni Has Suffered Enough. She Has Been Subject To Acts Of Violence And Humiliations To Undermine Her Human Dignity. I Am Convinced That She Must Be Set Free.

-Noam Chomsky

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Judge Afiuni Has Suffered

Noam Chomsky

...

Judge Afiuni Has Suffered Enough. She Has Been Subject To Acts Of Violence And Humiliations To Undermine Her Human Dignity. I Am Convinced That She Must Be Set Free.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Noam Chomsky

A Democracy Barely Functions Under The Neoliberal System.

Pick The Topic You Like: The Middle East, International Terrorism, Central America, Whatever It Is - The Picture Of The World That's Presented To The Public Has Only The Remotest Relation To Reality. The Truth Of The Matter Is Buried Under Edifice After Edifice Of Lies Upon Lies. It's All Been A Marvelous Success From The Point Of View In Deterring The Threat Of Democracy, Achieved Under Conditions Of Freedom, Which Is Extremely Interesting. It's Not Like A Totalitarian State, Where It's Done By Force. These Achievements Are Under Conditions Of Freedom.

What Is The Nature Of The Genetic Endowment? How Does Acquisition Proceed? Etc. Scientists Do Routinely Ask Similar Questions About The Visual System, System Of Motor Organisation, And Others - Including, In Fact, The Digestive System.

Anti-union Propaganda Has Been Considerably More Successful Here [ In The U.s.] Than In Europe, Even Among Working People Who Would Benefit [from] Unions.

The Democrats Have Pretty Much Given Up On The White Working Class. That Would Require A Commitment To Economic Issues And That's Not Their Concern.

In Societies That Profess Some Respect For Law, Suspects Are Apprehended And Brought To Fair Trial. I Stress 'suspects.'

There Had Been A Free And Open Election In Haiti In The Early 1990s And President Jean-bertrand Aristide Won, A Populist Priest. A Few Months Later Came The Expected Military Coup - A Very Vicious Military Junta Took Over, Of Which The United States Was Passively Supportive. Not Openly, Of Course, But Haitians Started To Flee From The Terror And Were Sent Back And On Towards Guantanamo Bay. Of Course, That Is Against International Law. But The United States Pretended That They Were "economic Refugees."

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.

The Local Grocery Store Was A Gathering, A Community Place. You Knew The Owner, If You Didn't Have Any Money They'd Let You Go For A Couple Days. You Talked. It Was A Friendly Place. Supermarkets Are Totally Impersonal. I Mean, You May Say Hello To The Checkout Girl Or Something, But The Personal Connections Are All Gone.

Discovery Is The Ability To Be Puzzled By Simple Things. Noam Chomsky

If It's Wrong When They Do It, It's Wrong When We Do It.

International Relations

One Of The Truths About The World Is That There Are Two Superpowers, One A Huge Power Which Happens To Have Its Boot On Your Neck; Another, A Smaller Power Which Happens To Have Its Boot On Other People's Necks. I Think That Anyone In The Third World Would Be Making A Grave Error If They Succumbed To Illusions About These Matters

Going Back To Why People Don't Vote, I Presume The Main Reason Is Because They Understand Without Reading Political Science Texts That It Doesn't Make Any Difference How They Vote. It's Not Going To Affect Policy, So Why Bother?

Virtually All Informed Observers Agree That A Fair And Equitable Resolution Of The Plight Of The Palestinians Would Considerably Weaken The Anger And Hatred Of Israel And The Us In The Arab And Muslim Worlds - And Far Beyond, As International Polls Reveal. Such An Agreement Is Surely Within Reach, If The Us And Israel Depart From Their Long-standing Rejectionism.

Silicon Valley Wouldn't Exist Without Massive Government Spending And In Fact Initiative.

Women Taking Care Of Children . . . It Makes Sense To Pay Them For That Work . . . They Should Be Paid For It, But That Requires Tax Payments. And The Same Is True About Protection Of The Environment.

Why Should Iran Have A Deterrent Strategy? Well, It's Surrounded By Hostile Enemies. Both Of Its Borders Have Been Under Occupation By A Hostile Superpower, The United States, Which Is Constantly Violating The U.n. Charter By Leaving Open What They Call The Saying, 'all Options Are Open' - Meaning The Threat Of War.

I Have Not Suggested That The Emergence Of Language Is Instantaneous. Rather, That The Rewiring Of The Brain Enabling An Infinite Array Of Structured Expressions Was In Effect Instantaneous. I Have Never Heard Of An Alternative To This Suggestion.

Anyone Who Studies Declassified Documents Soon Becomes Aware That Government Secrecy Is Largely An Effort To Protect Policy Makers From Scrutiny By Citizens, Not To Protect The Country From Enemies.

The Literature Is Like That - They [unions] Are Constantly Talking About The Masses, The Danger They Pose, And How To Control Them. They Understand What They're Doing, And They're Very Class Conscious. They Press Policies Which Work For Their Interests.

Efforts Can Succeed Over Time, And Not Trying Ensures That The Worst Will Happen.

I Don't Like Piracy But If Anybody's Concerned About Piracy, Why Don't They Pay Attention To Our Role In It?

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.

Since November 8, 2017 The United States Is Literally Alone In The World In First Of All Refusing To Join In Efforts To Do Something About Climate Change, But Even Worse, Dedicated To Making The Situation Worse. Every Part Of The World Is Trying To Do Something. The United States Alone Is Trying To Destroy It, And It's Not Just Trump, It's The Whole Republican Party. You Just Can't Find Words For It. And It's Not Reported. It's Not Discussed.

In The Early 1940s, As A Young Teenager, I Was Utterly Appalled By The Racist And Jingoist Hysteria Of The Anti-japanese Propaganda. The Germans Were Evil, But Treated With Some Respect: They Were, After All, Blond Aryan Types, Just Like Our Imaginary Self-image. Japanese Were Mere Vermin, To Be Crushed Like Ants.

The West Bank Is Essentially Imprisoned.

In Fact, By Universal Grammar I Mean Just That System Of Principles And Structures That Are The Prerequisites For Acquisition Of Language, And To Which Every Language Necessarily Conforms.

Karl Marx Said, “the Task Is Not Just To Understand The World But To Change It.” A Variant To Keep In Mind Is That If You Want To Change The World You’d Better Try To Understand It. That Doesn’t Mean Listening To A Talk Or Reading A Book, Though That’s Helpful Sometimes. You Learn From Participating. You Learn From Others. You Learn From The People You’re Trying To Organize. We All Have To Gain The Understanding And The Experience To Formulate And Implement Ideas.

The Major Organizing Centers, Like The Labor Movement, Have Been Severely Weakened In The United States By Policy.

Control Of Thought Is More Important For Governments That Are Free And Popular Than For Despotic And Military States. The Logic Is Straightforward: A Despotic State Can Control Its Domestic Enemies By Force, But As The State Loses This Weapon, Other Devices Are Required To Prevent The Ignorant Masses From Interfering With Public Affairs, Which Are None Of Their Business… The Public Are To Be Observers, Not Participants, Consumers Of Ideology As Well As Products.

Ignorant Masses

Up Until The First World War, When People Turned Anti-german, Germany Had Been Described By American Political Scientists As The Model Of Democracy.

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.

[internet] Is Kind Of Like A Hammer. The Technology Itself Doesn't Determine How Its Used. It Depends On The Social, Cultural And Economic Context In Which The Technology Is Made Available.

You Don't Have Any Other Society Where The Educated Classes Are So Effectively Indoctrinated And Controlled By A Subtle Propaganda System - A Private System Including Media, Intellectual Opinion Forming Magazines And The Participation Of The Most Highly Educated Sections Of The Population. Such People Ought To Be Referred To As "commissars - For That Is What Their Essential Function Is - To Set Up And Maintain A System Of Doctrines And Beliefs Which Will Undermine Independent Thought And Prevent A Proper Understanding And Analysis Of National And Global Institutions, Issues, And Policies".

Extensive Violations Of Human Rights (torture, Forced Reduction Of Living Standards For Much Of The Population, Police-sponsored Death Squads, Destruction Of Representative Institutions Or Of Independent Unions, Etc.) Are Directly Correlated With Us Government Support. The Linkage Is Not Accidental; Rather It Is Systematic. The Reason Is Obvious Enough. Client Fascism Often Improves The Business Climate For American Corporations, Quite Generally The Guiding Factor In Foreign Policy.

Violation Of Human Rights

There Are Many Concepts Of Spirituality, Among Them, Various Notions Of Divinity Developed In The Judaeo-christian-islamic Religions. Within These The Concepts Vary Greatly.

There's An Interesting Book By The Former Brazilian Ambassador Celso Amorim. In 2010, He Initiated An Effort Along With Turkey To Settle The Whole Iran Issue. Nobody Outside Of The United States Takes It To Be Much Of An Issue. They Made A Deal With Iran For Iran To Essentially Give Away Its Low Enriched Uranium To Turkey For Storage, And In Return, The Western Powers. It Was Immediately Scratched By Barack Obama And Hillary Clinton. And The Main Reason Was They Didn't Want Anybody Else To Be Involved In It. We Were Supposed To Run Things, But We Didn't Say That.

After All, The Internet Originated Around 1960 And Wasn't Privatized Until 1995. That's Thirty Five Years In The Public Domain During The Hard, Creative Development Period.

Some Of [donald Trump] Comments Can Be Interpreted As Potentially Reducing The Threat Of Nuclear War. The Major Threat Right Now Is Right On The Russian Border. Notice, Not The Mexican Border, The Russian Border. And It's Serious. He Has Made Various Statements Moving Towards Reducing The Tensions, Accommodating Russian Concerns And So On.

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.

See, People With Power Understand Exactly One Thing: Violence.

Some [people] May Be "servants Of The Power Structure," But That Has To Be Shown. I Think It Often Can Be Shown, But The Burden Of Proof Is On The Critic Who Puts Forth That Thesis In Particular Cases.

Burden Of Proof

The Lessons Are, Unfortunately, That A Small Weak Country That Is Facing An Extremely Hostile And Very Violent Superpower Will Not Make Much Progress Unless There's A Strong Solidarity Movement Within The Superpower That Will Restrain Its Actions. With More Support Within The United States, I Think The Haitian Efforts Could Have Succeeded.

It Is Quite Possible--overwhelmingly Probable, One Might Guess--that We Will Always Learn More About Human Life And Personality From Novels Than From Scientific Psychology

Farming Out Atrocities To Paramilitaries Is Standard Operating Procedure.

If You Want To Control A Population... Give Them A God To Worship.

The American Revolution Was A Small Part Of A Major World War Going On Between France And England, So The French Intervened And That Was A Big Factor, But The Domestic Contribution Was Basically Guerrilla Warfare.

France And England

American Society Is Now Remarkably Atomized. Political Organizations Have Collapsed. In Fact, It Seems Like Even Bowling Leagues Are Collapsing. The Left Has A Lot To Answer For Here. There's Been A Drift Toward Very Fragmenting Tendencies Among Left Groups, Toward This Sort Of Identity Politics.

Identity Politics

Education Is Not Just You Learn How A Mosquito Flies In The Rain, But You Learn How To Be Creative And Why It's Exciting To Learn Things And Create Things And Make Up New Things.

The Actual Consequences Of Plan Colombia Are To Devastate Peasant Communities, Which Have Been Driven To Drug Production. These Peasants Have No Particular Desire To Grow Coca, But Their Other Means Of Livelihood Have Been Wiped Out.

Part Of The Nafta Legislation Required Studies Of Labor Practices, And There Was Quite A Good Study That Came Out By A Labor Historian On The Use Of Nafta To Undermine And Destroy Unions.

This Is A Large Part Of The Academic Profession: To Make Up Complex, Subtle Arguments That Are Childishly Ridiculous But Are Enveloped In Sufficient Profundity That They Take On A Kind Of Plausibility.

[my Father] Came Over As An Immigrant And Didn't Know Any English. He Went To Work At A Sweat Shop In Baltimore. He Told Me Later That This Guy Was Coming Around, And The Guy Seemed To Be For The Workers, So He Signed Up. It Turned Out That Guy Was An Iww Organizer . My Father Didn't Regret Signing Up; He Just Really Didn't Know What Was Going On.

Jean Kirkpatrick [is] The Chief Sadist-in-residence Of The Reagan Administration.

As A Research Tool, The Internet Is Invaluable.

There's A Tremendous Gap Between Public Opinion And Public Policy.

American Decline Is Real, Though The Apocalyptic Vision Reflects The Familiar Ruling Class Perception That Anything Short Of Total Control Amounts To Total Disaster.

For Fifty Years, We Heard Nato Is Necessary To Save Western Europe From The Russian Hordes, You Know The Slave State, Stuff I Was Taking About. In 1990-91, No Russian Hordes. Okay, What Happens? Well There Are Actually Visions Of The Future System That Were Presented. One Was [mikhail] Gorbachev. He Called For A Eurasian Security System, With No Military Blocs. He Called It A Common European Home. No Military Blocs, No Warsaw Pact. Just An Integrated Security System With No Conflicts.now The Other Vision Was Presented By George Bush, This Is The "statesman".

Security Systems

Technology Can Be Used That Way And It Can Also Be Used In Other Ways.

Surely Few If Any Readers Have Come Across The Sentence They Are Now Reading, And Someone Who Had By Chance Heard Or Seen It Could Not Possibly Remember Such A Fact.

Iraq Has The Second Largest Oil Reserves In The World, It Is Right In The Midst Of The Major Energy Reserves In The World. Its Been A Primary Goal Of Us Policy Since World War Ii To Control What The State Department Called "a Stupendous Source Of Strategic Power" And One Of The Greatest Material Prizes In History.

The Media Is Uncritical, And Their So-called The Concept Of Objectivity Translates Into Keeping Everything Within The Beltway. However, Iraq Was Quite Different. Here, There Were Flat-out Lies, And They Sort Of Knew It. They Were Desperately Trying To Make Connections Between Saddam Hussein And 9/11.

When I Look At Public Opinion, I'm Not Far Out Of The Mainstream. I'm In It, In Many Respects. In Some Respects, Public Opinion Goes Beyond Anything I've Ever Said.

It Is ... Necessary To Whip Up The Population In Support Of Foreign Adventures. Usually The Population Is Pacifist, Just Like They Were During The First World War. The Public Sees No Reason To Get Involved In Foreign Adventures, Killing, And Torture. So You Have To Whip Them Up. And To Whip Them Up You Have To Frighten Them.

The Similarity Is That Concentration Of Capital Influences Virtually Everything That Goes On. It Influences The Way The Media Functions, It Very Powerfully Influences How The Government Works And It Of Course Influences Corporate Sector Elements, Like Say How Google Or Amazon Present Materials That Reach The Public.

The Bolshevik Revolution Was A Counter-revolution. Its First Moves Were To Destroy And Eliminate Every Socialist Tendency That Had Developed In The Pre-revolutionary Period. Their Goal Was As They Said; It Wasn't A Big Secret. They Regarded The Soviet Union As Sort A Backwater. They Were Orthodox Marxists, Expecting A Revolution In Germany. They Moved Toward What They Themselves Called "state Capitalism," Then They Moved On To Stalinism. They Called It Democracy And Called It Socialism. The One Claim Was As Ludicrous As The Other.

How Many Educated Americans Can Even Remember The Names Of The Assassinated Jesuit Intellectuals Of El Salvador, Or Would Know Where To Find A Word They Wrote? The Answers Are Revealing, Particularly When We Draw The Striking - And Historically Typical - Contrast To The Attitudes Towards Their Counterparts In Enemy Domains.

The Kind Of Work That Should Be The Main Part Of Life Is The Kind Of Work You Would Want To Do If You Weren't Being Paid For It. It’s Work That Comes Out Of Your Own Internal Needs, Interests And Concerns.

Travel From What Is Called Pakistan To Afghanistan Has Been Made Increasingly Difficult And People Are Often Labelled Terrorists, Even Those Who Might Be Just Visiting Families.

There Is A Kind Of Nonlinguistic Thought Going On Which We Are Trying To Represent In Language, And We Know That Sometimes We Fail.

You Have To Love That Government, But Hate The Government That Might Work In Your Interest And That You Could Control. That's An Interesting Propaganda Task, But It's Been Carried Out Very Well.

... An Essential Feature Of A Decent Society, And An Almost Defining Feature Of A Democratic Society, Is Relative Equality Of Outcome - Not Opportunity, But Outcome. Without That You Can't Seriously Talk About A Democratic State... These Concepts Of The Common Good Have A Long Life. They Lie Right At The Core Of Classical Liberalism, Of Enlightenment Thinking... Like Aristotle, [adam] Smith Understood That The Common Good Will Require Substantial Intervention To Assure Lasting Prosperity Of The Poor By Distribution Of Public Revenues.

Education Is Not For Profit. If You're Not In Education For Profit, It's Not Going To Be A Fair Critique For Education.

The Intellectual Tradition Is One Of Servility To Power, And If I Didn't Betray It I'd Be Ashamed Of Myself.

The New Crimes That The Us And Israel Were Committing In Gaza As 2009 Opened Do Not Fit Easily Into Any Standard Category—except For The Category Of Familiarity.

So, At One Extreme You Have Indigenous, Tribal Societies Trying To Stem The Race To Disaster. At The Other Extreme, The Richest, Most Powerful Societies In World History, Like The United States And Canada, Are Racing Full-speed Ahead To Destroy The Environment As Quickly As Possible.

Allowing An Independent And Sovereign Iraq Could Be A Nightmare For The United States. It Would Mean That It Would Be Shi'ite-dominated, At Least If It's Minimally Democratic. It Would Continue To Improve Relations With Iran, Just What The United States Doesn't Want To See. And Beyond That, Right Across The Border In Saudi Arabia Where Most Of Saudi Oil Is, There Happens To Be A Large Shi'ite Population, Probably A Majority.

We Live In This World, Not Another One That We'd Prefer, And Sometimes It's Necessary To Follow Painful Paths If We Hope To Provide At Least A Little Help For Suffering People.

Should People Be Mere "interested Spectators Of Action," Not "participants," Restricted To Lending Their Weight Periodically To One Or Another Sector Of The "responsible Men," As Advocates Of "manufacture Of Consent" Have Recommended? Or Should Their Rights Transcend These Highly Restricted Bounds?

The Social And Physical Construction Of Suburban America Really Was Quite Complex. It Was A Very Elaborate System, And Clearly A Massive Social Engineering Project That Has Changed U.s. Society Enormously.

The Money In Politics Is A Cash Cow For The Media.

In Fact If You Look At Reagan's Global War On Terrorism It Very Quickly Turned Into A Massive Terrorist War: [by Us] Central America, South Africa, The Middle East, All U.s.-backed Terrorism. That's One Of The Reasons Why It Disappeared From History And Why The Standard Line Is That Bush 43 Declared The War On Terror. Actually He Just Repeated What Reagan Had Said 20 Years Earlier.

We Need Not Stride Resolutely Towards Catastrophe, Merely Because Those Are The Marching Orders.

What The [james] Monroe Doctrine Stated, In Effect, Is That The Us Should Dominate The Hemisphere.

That Was The Reason Why Very Few People Fleeing The Rise Of Fascism In Europe, Especially In Germany, Could Get To The United States. And There Were Famous Incidents Like With The Ms Saint Louis, Which Brought A Lot Of Immigrants, Mostly Jewish, From Europe. It Reached Cuba, With People Expecting To Be Admitted To The United States From There. But The Administration Of Franklin D. Roosevelt Wouldn't Allow Them In And They Had To Go Back To Europe Where Many Of Them Died In Concentration Camps.

It's True That Many Say That [they] Object To The Idea Of "human Nature," But It's Not Clear What That Is Supposed To Mean. Are We Different From Ants?

In The Years Of The Reagan-bush Administration Alone, About 1.5 Million People Were Killed By South Africa Just In The Surrounding Countries. Forget What Was Happening In South Africa And Namibia.

I'll Have 15 Letters Today From Mostly Young Kids Who Don't Like What's Going On And Want To Do Something About It, And [they Ask Me] If I Can Give Them Some Advice As To What They Should Do, Or Can I Tell Them What To Read Or Something.

The Syntactic Component Of A Grammar Must Specify, For Each Sentence, A Deep Structure That Determines Its Semantic Interpretationand A Surface Structure That Determines Its Phonetic Interpretation.

What's Called "liberal" In The Intelectual Culture Means Highly Conformist To Power, But Mildly Critical.

There Are Big, Extremely Irrational Parts Of The Society, And They Have Now Been Mobilized Politically By The Republican Establishment, Hoping That These People Could Be An Electoral Base To Keep Them In Power.

Establishing A Client State In Iraq Would Significantly Enhance That Strategic Power, A Matter Of Great Significance For The Future. As Zbigniew Brzezinski Observed, It Would Provide The Us With "critical Leverage" Of Its European And Asian Rivals, A Conception With Roots In Early Post-war Planning. These Are Substantial Reasons For Aggression - Not Unlike Those Of The British When They Invaded And Occupied Iraq Over 80 Years Earlier, At The Dawn Of The Oil Age.

Barack Obama Is An Opportunist, Mostly Supported By The Financial Institutions. He Had No Positions On Anything. He's Very Intelligent. If You Look At His Program, Almost No Substance. Change, Hope, What's That? I Mean, He Had Some Policies, But It Was Almost Certain That He Would Give Them Up Instantly, Which He Did.

When I Arrived In Laos And Found Young Americans Living There, Out Of Free Choice, I Was Surprised. After Only A Week, I Began To Have A Sense Of The Appeal Of The Country And Its People - Along With Despair About Its Future.

When People Know We Are Ready To Use Nuclear Weapons, They're Going To Back Off If We Do Something Aggressive. So Basically, Nuclear Weapons Are Always Being Used.

Markets Are Lethal, If Only Because Of Ignoring Externalities, The Impacts Of Their Transactions On The Environment.

The Structure Of Language Determines Not Only Thought, But Reality Itself.

My Proposal Happens To Be Very Mainstream.

There Is A Social Responsibility To Take Care Of Vulnerable People. It Seems That A Sensible Social Responsibility Is Obligatory Education, But Also Decent Education, And That Is Not Happening.

We Can, For Example, Be Fairly Confident That Either There Will Be A World Without War Or There Won't Be A World - At Least, A World Inhabited By Creatures Other Than Bacteria And Beetles, With Some Scattering Of Others.

You Keep Plugging Away--that's The Way Social Change Takes Place. That's The Way Every Social Change In History Has Taken Place: By A Lot Of People, Who Nobody Ever Heard Of, Doing Work.

To Speak Truth To Power Is Not A Particularly Honorable Vocation. One Should Seek Out An Audience That Matters - And Furthermore (another Important Qualification), It Should Not Be Seen As An Audience, But As A Community Of Common Concern In Which One Hopes To Participate Constructively.

You Can Imagine A Different World In Which A Number Of Species Developed With Different Genetically Determined Linguistic Systems. It Hasn't Happened In Evolution. What Has Happened Is That One Species Has Developed, And The Genetic Structure Of This Species Happens To Involve A Variety Of Intricate Abstract Principles Of Linguistic Organization That, Therefore, Necessarily Constrain Every Language, And, In Fact, Create The Basis For Learning Language As A Way Of Organizing Experience Rather Than Constituting Something Learned From Experience.

The [ronald] Reagan Administration Picked Up The Rhetoric Of The Anti-nuclear Movement; They Said "yyeah, You're Right." We Have To Eliminate Nuclear Weapons.

The Republican Party Among The Public Is A Minority Party.

George Washington Hated The Guerrillas. He Wanted To Imitate The British Red Coat Armies, Fighting As Gentlemen Are Supposed To Fight.

I Don't Really See What Can Be Said About The Role Of Faculty Members, Or Universities, Beyond The Truisms Voiced Earlier, And Their Elaboration In Various Domains, Ranging From Focused Intellectual Pursuits To The Concerns Of The Larger Society And Future Generations.

Faculty Members

The People Who Live On The Land - Israelis And Palestinians - Have A Right To Live In Security And Peace.

The Intellectual Is An Individual With A Specific Public Role In Society That Cannot Be Reduced Simply To . . A Faceless Professional.

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.

The General Population Doesn't Know What's Happening, And It Doesn't Even Know That It Doesn't Know.

As Long As Nuclear Weapons Exist, The Chances Of Survival Of The Human Species Are Quite Slight.

Today, Aid To Colombia Is Given Under The Pretext Of A Drug War. That's Pretty Hard To Take Seriously. Ten Years Ago, Amnesty International Flatly Called It A Myth.

In Many Respects, The United States Is A Great Country. Freedom Of Speech Is Protected More Than In Any Other Country. It Is Also A Very Free Society.

Freedom Of Speech

People Don't Have Knowledge And Understanding About The Outside World, Or About History [in The Usa].

George Kennan Is Another Extreme Case. He Was The American Consul In Berlin Until The War Between Germany And The United States Broke Out In December 1941. And Until Then He Was Writing Pretty Supportive Statements Back Stressing That We Shouldn't Be So Hard On The Nazis If They Were Doing Something We Didn't Agree With - Basically Repeating The Idea That They Were People We Could Do Business With.

The More You Can Increase Fear Of Drugs And Crime, Welfare Mothers, Immigrants And Aliens, The More You Control All The People.

It Takes One Minute To Tell A Lie, And An Hour To Refute It.

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.

There Are No Conservatives In The United States. The United States Does Not Have A Conservative Tradition. The People Who Call Themselves Conservatives, Like The Heritage Foundation Or Gingrich, Are Believers In -- Are Radical Statists. They Believe In A Powerful State, But A Welfare State For The Rich.

Colombia Has Been The Leading Western Recipient Of U.s. Arms And Training As Violence Has Grown Through The '90s.

Hypocrites Are Those Who Apply To Others The Standards That They Refuse To Accept For Themselves.

The Dominant Propaganda Systems Have Appropriated The Term "globalization" To Refer To The Specific Version Of International Economic Integration That They Favor, Which Privileges The Rights Of Investors And Lenders, Those Of People Being Incidental. In Accord With This Usage, Those Who Favor A Different Form Of International Integration, Which Privileges The Rights Of Human Beings, Become "anti-globalist."

As Long As Individuals Are Compelled To Rent Themselves On The Market To Those Who Are Willing To Hire Them, As Long As Their Role In Production Is Simply That Of Ancillary Tools, Then There Are Striking Elements Of Coercion And Oppression That Make Talk Of Democracy Very Limited, If Even Meaningful.

English Is A Second Language In Most Of The Educated Sectors Of Europe And Much Of The World. But Maybe In The Future Chinese Will Be. But I Doubt That National Languages Will Disappear. In Fact, To Some Extent They're Becoming More Diverse, Like In Europe.

Actually, My First Article, It Wasn't About The Anarchists; It Was About The Fall Of Barcelona And The Spread Of Fascism Over Europe, Which Was Frightening. But A Couple Of Years Later I Became Interested In The Anarchist Movement.

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.

The People We Call The Prophets I Think Are The Earliest Dissident Intellectuals, And They're Treated Like Most Dissident Intellectuals - Very Badly. They're Imprisoned, Driven Into The Desert. King Ahab, The Epitome Of Evil In The Bible, Condemned Elijah As A "hater Of Israel." This Is The First Self-hating Jew, The Origin Of The Term. It Goes Right Up To The Present. That's The History Of Intellectuals.

That's Our Nuclear Weapons Strategy [going To Frighten People], As Of The Early Post-cold War Years. And I Think This Is A Real Failure Of The Intellectual Community, Including Scholarship And The Media. It's Not Like You Had Headlines All Over The Place. And It's Not Secret, The Documents Are There. And I Think That's Probably The Right Picture.

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.

Internal Security Means Something. It Means War Against Your Own Population.

In The United States, The Day When You Pay Your Taxes Is A Day Of Mourning Because This Alien Force - The Government - Is Coming To Rob You Of Your Hard-earned Money. That's The General Attitude, And It's A Tremendous Victory For The Opponents Of Democracy, And, Of Course, Any Privileged Sector Is Going To Hate Democracy. You Can See It In The Healthcare Debate.

We Naturally Assume That Our Mental Structures Are Universal. But I Suppose An Outside Biologist Looking At Us Would See Something Very Different. He Would See That, Like Other Organisms, We Have A Narrow Sphere Within Which We Are Very Good, But That Sphere Is Very Limited. And That, In Fact, The Very Achievements We Can Have Within That Sphere Are Related To Lack Of Achievements In Other Spheres.

If You Have To Control People, You Have To Have An Administrative Force That Does It. So In U.s. Industry, Even More Than Elsewhere, There's Layer After Layer Of Management - A Kind Of Economic Waste, But Useful For Control And Domination. And The Same Is True In Universities.

Democracy Is A Danger To Any Powerful Group.

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.

This Is Class War On An International Scale, And Power Is In The Hands Of Those Who Control The International Economic System.

If The Rewiring Of The Brain That Yielded Recursive Generation Of Hierarchically Structured Expressions Took Place In An Individual, Not A Group (and There Seems To Be No Coherent Alternative), Then Interaction Must Have Been A Later Phenomenon.

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

Trump's Principal Policies Make Clear What's Going To Happen. This Gives An Opportunity. Right Now It's Going To Take Hard Work, But It's Possible That There Could Be A Real Revival Of The Labor Movement.

If You Are Not Offending People Who Ought To Be Offended, You're Doing Something Wrong.

[mikhail] Gorbachev Complained. He Was Told Look, There's Nothing On Paper. People Didn't Actually Say It But The Implication Was Look, If You Are Dumb Enough To Take Faith In A Gentleman's Agreement With Us, That's Your Problem. Nato Expanded To East Germany.

I Think Such An Inquiry Will Reveal A Rather Different Picture: Namely, It Will Reveal A Very Strong Tendency For The Intellectuals Who Are Respected And Privileged To Be Those Who Subordinate Themselves To Power.

During The 1960s, Large Groups Of People Who Are Normally Passive And Apathetic Began To Try To Enter The Political Arena To Press Their Demands.... The Naive Might Call That Democracy, But That's Because They Don't Understand. The Sophisticated Understand That That's The Crisis Of Democracy.

The Us Is Off The Spectrum In Religious Commitment. It's Been Increasing Since 1980 But It's A Major Part Of The Voting Base Of The Republican Party So That Means Committing To Anti-abortion Positions, Opposing Women's Rights.

The Republicans Have Picked That As The One Thing That They Want To Hang On To To Try To Gain Some Political Stand, So They Have To Destroy What They Call Obamacare. This Is Now Not All The Republicans, It's A Wing Of The Republican Party, Which Is Called Conservative But In Fact Is Just Deeply Reactionary.

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.

I Just Went Along With Political Activists And Interested In Other Intellectual Interests Which I Pursued Kind Of At Random. I Never Had A Real College Education. I Got A Degree, But It Was Just Patching Together Courses Here And There.

It's A Principle That Anything Our Leaders Do Is For Noble Reasons. It May Be Mistaken, It May Be Ugly, But Basically Noble. And If You Bring In Normal Moderate, Conservative, Strategic, Economic Objectives You Threatening That Principle.

Now Financial Liberalization Is Just A Catastrophe Waiting To Happen, And There Are Very Well Understood Reasons For That.

The Reason Academic Disputes Are So Vicious Is That So Little Is At Stake.

It Makes Sense To Work Towards A Better World, But It Doesn't Make Any Sense To Have Illusions About What The Real World Is.

There Is No Reason To Accept The Doctrines Crafted To Sustain Power And Privilege, Or To Believe That We Are Constrained By Mysterious And Unknown Social Laws. These Are Simply Decisions Made Within Institutions That Are Subject To Human Will And That Must Face The Test Of Legitimacy. And If They Do Not Meet The Test, They Can Be Replaced By Other Institutions That Are More Free And More Just, As Has Happened Often In The Past.

Hamas Is Regularly Described As 'iranian-backed Hamas, Which Is Dedicated To The Destruction Of Israel.' One Will Be Hard Put To Find Something Like 'democratically Elected Hamas, Which Has Long Been Calling For A Two-state Settlement In Accord With The International Consensus'—blocked For Over 30 Years By The Us And Israel. All True, But Not A Useful Contribution To The Party Line, Hence Dispensable.

A Captured Pirate Was Brought Before Alexander The Great. “how Dare You Molest The Sea?” Asked Alexander. “how Dare You Molest The Whole World?” The Pirate Replied, And Continued: “because I Do It With A Little Ship Only, I Am Called A Thief; You, Doing It With A Great Navy, Are Called An Emperor.

I Think It Only Makes Sense To Seek Out And Identify Structures Of Authority, Hierarchy, And Domination In Every Aspect Of Life, And To Challenge Them; Unless A Justification For Them Can Be Given, They Are Illegitimate, And Should Be Dismantled, To Increase The Scope Of Human Freedom.

Most Of What Is Done I Think Is To Kept Secret So The Public Won't Know. The Same Is True Of What Wikileaks Exposed.

Personally, I Am Uneasy About The Notion Of "a Politically Engaged University," For Reasons I Wrote About Over 30 Years Ago, At The Height Of Protest And Resistance (reprinted In For Reasons Of State).

Should We Even Have The Classification System? Why Shouldn't These Things Be Open? There Are Things You Want To Keep Secret, Like The Characteristics Of Your Latest Fighter Plane Or Something Like That.

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

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

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.

Major Efforts Have To Be Undertaken To Bring The General Public To Understand The Real Reasons For Their Plight, And The Possibilities For Radical Social And Political Change To Construct Meaningful Popular Control Of All Institutions - In Communities, In The Workplace, In The Larger Society, And On To The International Order.

In Other Countries, Rich And Poor, Education Remains Substantially Free, With Educational Standards That Rank High In Global Comparisons. Even In The Us, Higher Education Was Almost Free During The Economically Successful Years Before The Neoliberal Reaction - And It Was A Much Poorer Country Then. The Gi Bill Provided Free Education To Huge Numbers Of People - White Men Overwhelmingly - Who Would Probably Never Have Gone To College, A Great Benefit To Them Personally And To The Whole Society. Tuition At Private Colleges Was Far Below Today's Exorbitant Costs.

The American Escalation Of The War In Laos Provoked A Response By The Communist Forces, Which Now Control More Of Laos Than Ever Before.

If You And I Go Into A Store To Rob It, And I Say "shoot," That's Not Protected. Like All Judicial Decisions And Legislation, This Leaves Plenty Of Gray Areas, Including Many Of Great Significance That Are Rarely Discussed: Advocacy Of Imminent War Crimes, Such As Aggression, For Example. I Think We Would All Agree That Such Speech Should Be Protected, Despite The Often Horrific Consequences, But It's Worth Noting That That Stretches The Doctrine To Its Limits.

Iran Is Independent And Independence Is Not Tolerated.

I Don't Want Followers.

Parts Of The United States Are Taking On A Third World Look.

What Happened In The Missile Crisis In October 1962 Has Been Prettified To Make It Look As If Acts Of Courage And Thoughtfulness Abounded. The Truth Is That The Whole Episode Was Almost Insane.

For 500 Years, Since European Explorers Came, Latin American Countries Had Been Separated From One Another. They Had Very Limited Relations. Integration Is A Prerequisite For Independence.

Bear In Mind That Capitalism Is A Tiny Period Of Human Society. You Never Really Had Capitalism, You Always Had One Or Another Variant Of State Capitalism.

Isn't It Interesting That Eating A Banana Is Somehow Comical.

There Isn't Much Point Arguing About The Word "libertarian." It Would Make About As Much Sense To Argue With An Unreconstructed Stalinist About The Word "democracy" - Recall That They Called What They'd Constructed "peoples' Democracies." The Weird Offshoot Of Ultra-right Individualist Anarchism That Is Called "libertarian" Here Happens To Amount To Advocacy Of Perhaps The Worst Kind Of Imaginable Tyranny, Namely Unaccountable Private Tyranny. If They Want To Call That "libertarian," Fine; After All, Stalin Called His System "democratic." But Why Bother Arguing About It?

Contemporary Technology Could Be Used To Eliminate Ownership And Management Of Corporations. It Could Be Used To Provide - Lets Say Apple Computers. In Principle Information Technology Could Be Used To Provide Direct Information To The Work Force On The Ground So That They Could Democratically Decide What The Company Would Do, Eliminating The Role Of Management. It Could Be Used For That. People Aren't Developing Technology For That Purpose.

Capitalism’s Concept Of Competitive Man Who Seeks Only To Maximize Wealth And Power, Who Subjects Himself To Market Relationships, To Exploitation And External Authority, Is Anti-human And Intolerable In The Deepest Sense

As Long As The General Population Is Passive, Apathetic, Diverted To Consumerism Or Hatred Of The Vulnerable, Then The Powerful Can Do As They Please, And Those Who Survive Will Be Left To Contemplate The Outcome.

My Own Feeling Is That A Corporation Has No Right To Have A Political Or Social Influence.

A Lot Of People Who Voted For Trump, Working Class People, Voted For Obama In 2008. They Were Seduced By The Slogans "hope" And "change." They Didn't Get Hope, They Didn't Get Change, They Were Disillusioned. This Time They Voted For Another Candidate Who Is Calling For Hope And Change And Has Promised To Deliver All Kinds Of Amazing Things.

Ceos Pretty Much Pick The Boards That Give Them Salaries And Bonuses. That's One Of The Reasons Why The Ceo-to-payment [ratio] Has So Sharply Escalated In This Country In Contrast To Europe. (they're Similar Societies And It's Bad Enough There, But Here We're In The Stratosphere. ] There's No Particular Reason For It.

You Have To Rely On Yourself And Your Associates - Gifts Don't Come From Above; You're Going To Win Them, Or You Won't Have Them.

Rely On Yourself

...if You Ask Me Whether Or Not I'm An Atheist, I Wouldn't Even Answer. I Would First Want An Explanation Of What It Is That I'm Supposed Not To Believe In, And I've Never Seen An Explanation.

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

Worker Ownership Within A State Capitalist, Semi-market System Is Better Than Private Ownership But It Has Inherent Problems. Markets Have Well-known Inherent Inefficiencies. They're Very Destructive.

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.

That's A Large Part Of The Source Of The Gun Culture. You Have To Have A Gun When You Go Into Starbucks, Because Who Knows What's Going To Happen. It Just Doesn't Happen In Other Countries.

Selfish-gene Theory Tells Us Nothing About The Value Of Interacting Through Language.

My Own Concern Is Primarily The Terror And Violence Carried Out By My Own State... It Is Very Easy To Denounce The Atrocities Of Someone Else. That Has About As Much Ethical Value As Denouncing Atrocities That Took Place In The 18th Century.

I Think The Most Important Work That Is Going On Has To Do With The Search For Very General And Abstract Features Of What Is Sometimes Called Universal Grammar: General Properties Of Language That Reflect A Kind Of Biological Necessity Rather Than Logical Necessity; That Is, Properties Of Language That Are Not Logically Necessary For Such A System But Which Are Essential Invariant Properties Of Human Language And Are Known Without Learning. We Know These Properties But We Don't Learn Them. We Simply Use Our Knowledge Of These Properties As The Basis For Learning.

The Fourteenth Amendment, After The Civil War, In Principle Brought Former Slaves Into The Category Of Persons, Theoretically. But If You Actually Look, Almost All The Cases Brought Up For Personal Rights Under The Fourteenth Amendment Were By Corporations. Freed Slaves Couldn't Do It. In Fact They Were Pretty Much Driven Back Into Something Like Slavery By A North - South Compact, That Allowed Former Slave States To Criminalize Black Life, Which Made A Criminal Force That Was Basically Used As A Forced Labor Force, Up Until The 1930s.

The Search For Truth Is A Cooperative, Unending Endeavor. We Can, And Should, Engage In It To The Extent We Can And Encourage Others To Do So As Well, Seeking To Free Ourselves From Constraints Imposed By Coercive Institutions, Dogma, Irrationality, Excessive Conformity And Lack Of Initiative And Imagination, And Numerous Other Obstacles.

I Don't Bother Writing About Fox News. It Is Too Easy. What I Talk About Are The Liberal Intellectuals, The Ones Who Portray Themselves And Perceive Themselves As Challenging Power, As Courageous, As Standing Up For Truth And Justice. They Are Basically The Guardians Of The Faith. They Set The Limits. They Tell Us How Far We Can Go. They Say, 'look How Courageous I Am.' But Do Not Go One Millimeter Beyond That. At Least For The Educated Sectors, They Are The Most Dangerous In Supporting Power.

The Truth Of The Matter Is That About 99 Percent Of Teaching Is Making The Students Feel Interestedin The Material. Then The Other 1 Percent Has To Do With Your Methods. And That's Not Just True Of Languages. It's True Of Every Subject.

Human Language Is Nothing Like The Signalling Systems Of Other Animals.

Some May Remember, If You Have Good Memories, That There Used To Be A Concept In Anglo-american Law Called A Presumption Of Innocence, Innocent Until Proven Guilty In A Court Of Law. Now That's So Deep In History That There's No Point Even Bringing It Up, But It Did Once Exist.

Presumption Of Innocence

The Idea That People Should Be Allowed To Decide Something About Their Own Fate Is Just Anathema To European Elites.

Take The Iraq War,it's The Second Worst Crime After The Second World War. It's The First Time In History, In The History Of Imperialism, There Were Huge Demonstrations, Before The War Was Officially Launched.

In Kosovo, The U.s. Has Chosen A Course Of Action That Escalates Atrocities And Violence. It Is Also A Course Of Action That Strikes A Blow Against The Regime Of International Order, But Which Offers The Weak At Least Some Protection From Predatory States.

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

Putting It In Plain Terms, The General Public Must Be Reduced To Its Traditional Apathy And Obedience, And Driven From The Arena Of Political Debate And Action, If Democracy Is To Survive.

Trending Author

Nouriel Roubini

Category