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The Second World War Ended With A Radicalization Of The Population In The United States And Everywhere Else, And Called For All Kinds Of Things Like Popular Takeovers, Government Intervention, And Worker Takeovers Of Factories. Business Propagated A Tremendous Propaganda Offensive. The Scale Surprised Me When I Read The Scholarship - It's Enormous, And It's Been Very Effective. There Were Two Major Targets: One Is Unions, The Other Is Democracy.

-Noam Chomsky

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The Second World War

Noam Chomsky

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The Second World War Ended With A Radicalization Of The Population In The United States And Everywhere Else, And Called For All Kinds Of Things Like Popular Takeovers, Government Intervention, And Worker Takeovers Of Factories. Business Propagated A Tremendous Propaganda Offensive. The Scale Surprised Me When I Read The Scholarship - It's Enormous, And It's Been Very Effective. There Were Two Major Targets: One Is Unions, The Other Is Democracy.

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Government Intervention

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Today, The Danger Of Some Sort Of A Nuclear Catastrophe Is Greater Than It Was During The Cold War, And Most People Are Blissfully Unaware Of This Danger.

I'm Sorry To Say It Has Some Historical Analogs. It's Kind Of Reminiscent Of What Happened In Germany In The Late Weimar Years.

You Never Need An Argument Against The Use Of Violence, You Need An Argument For It.

A War With Pakistan Would Be An Utter Disaster.

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.

Women Didn't Have Rights. Under British Common Law, Women Were Property.

Our Yearning For Democracy Is Accompanied By A No Less Profound Yearning For Peace. And The Media Also Faced The Task Of Historical Engineering To Establish This Required Truth. We Therefore Have Phenomena Called 'peace Missions' And The 'peace Process'. These Are Terms That Apply To Whatever The United States Happens To Be Doing Or Advocating At Some Moment... In Short, 'war Is Peace'.

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.

In A Society That Has Very High Concentration Of Capital In A Narrow Sector Of The Population, That's Going To Influence Everything In Different Ways.

Amusing And Perfectly Self-conscious Charlatans.

I Don't Want Followers.

If You Assume There Is No Hope, You Guarantee There Will Be No Hope.

If You Care About Other People, You Might Try To Organize To Undermine Power And Authority. That's Not Going To Happen If You Care Only About Yourself.

It Was Declared By Congress That Marijuana Makes People Insane. But . . . Lawyers, Defense Lawyers, Got The Idea, Ok, I Can Use This For An Insanity Defense.

If Humans Are Organisms Like Every Other Organism - Which They Are - Then We Should Expect That If There Are Some Domains Where Real Scientific Progress Is Possible, Then There Are Others Where It Is Not.

I Think We Can Be Reasonably Confident That If The American Population Had The Slightest Idea Of What Is Being Done In Their Name, They Would Be Utterly Appalled.

You Know, You Can Go To The Fiftieth Thing On A Google List And That's The One You Want, But The Ones You Are Going To Be Directed To Are The Funders.

Just Media Alone Is Not Enough. You Have To Have Organization.

Citizenship Means Every Four Years You Put A Mark Somewhere And You Go Home And Let Other Guys Run The World. It's A Very Destructive Ideology.

My Position Is That We Should Not Succumb To Irrational Belief.

Millions Of People Are Getting The Vote, And We Have To Educate Them To Keep Them From Our Throats. In Other Words, We Have To Train Them In Obedience And Servility, So They're Not Going To Think Through The Way The World Works And Come After Our Throats.

There Is A Considerable Polarization Taking Place Here, Increasing The Gap Between Rich And Poor. It's Most Dramatic In Third World Countries, Of Course, But In The Rich Countries It's Also Very Noticeable.

Israel Uses Sophisticated Attack Jets And Naval Vessels To Bomb Densely-crowded Refugee Camps, Schools, Apartment Blocks, Mosques, And Slums To Attack A Population That Has No Air Force, No Air Defense, No Navy, No Heavy Weapons, No Artillery Units, No Mechanized Armor, No Command In Control, No Army And Calls It A War.

Well, They Really Didn't Have To Worry, Because The Way Power Politics Works, The World Court Can't Do Anything. Look, There's One Country In The World At The Moment Which Has Refused To Accept World Court Decision-that's The United States. Is Anybody Going To Do Anything About It?

When Israelis In The Occupied Territories Now Claim That They Have To Defend Themselves, They Are Defending Themselves In The Sense That Any Military Occupier Has To Defend Itself Against The Population They Are Crushing. You Can't Defend Yourself When You're Militarily Occupying Someone Else's Land. That's Not Defense. Call It What You Like, It's Not Defense.

In Our Case [the United States] It Happens To Be Basically Corporate Structure. Much Of The Population Is Going To Be Harmed By That. Those Policies Are Designed To Turn State Power Into An Instrument That Works For The Wealthy. Maybe There Are Some Crumbs For The Rest Of The Population, Maybe Not. But That's Given.

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.

The Us Is A Country [in Which] Eighty Percent Of The Population Thinks The Bible Was Written By God. About Half Think Every Word Is Literally True. So It's Had To Appeal To That - And To The Nativist Population, The People That Are Frightened, Have Always Been... It's A Very Frightened Country And That's Increasing Now With The Recognition That The White Population Is Going To Be A Minority Pretty Soon, "they've Taken Our Country From Us."

We Still Name Our Military Helicopter Gunships After Victims Of Genocide. Nobody Bats An Eyelash About That: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If The Luftwaffe Named Its Military Helicopters Jew And Gypsy, I Suppose People Would Notice.

We Can Try To Gain Some Of The Sensibility Of Some Of The Indigenous Populations Of The World Or Our Predecessors 800 Years Ago. We Can Laugh At Them As Being Naive And Unsophisticated, But Unless We Can Gain That Sensibility That There Has To Be Rights Of Nature As Bolivians And Others Put It, Then We're Going To Be Destroyed.

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.

I Agree With Bill Clinton That Us Forces Should Not Be Sent To Haiti, But Not For His Reasons.

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

The West Bank Is Essentially Imprisoned.

Half The Population Hold That The Government Is Run By A Few Big Interests Looking Out For Themselves, As Polls Regularly Show.

Welsh Is Now Almost A National Language In Wales. The Scottish Dialects Are Reviving To Some Extent. I Don't Think It's A Major Thing, But It's There, And It's Happening Elsewhere.

The Childcare Tax Credit Makes Some Sense.

Immediately After 11 September, The U.s. Closed Down The Somali Charitable Network Al-barakaat On Grounds That It Was Financing Terror. This Achievement Was Hailed One Of The Great Successes Of The 'war On Terror.' In Contrast, Washington's Withdrawal Of Its Charges As Without Merit A Year Later Aroused Little Notice.

If You Are Working 50 Hours A Week In A Factory, You Don't Have Time To Read 10 Newspapers A Day And Go Back To Declassified Government Archives. But Such People May Have Far-reaching Insights Into The Way The World Works.

One Of The Best Predictors Of Policy Around Is Thomas Ferguson's Investment Theory Of Politics, As He Calls It - Very Outstanding Political Economist - Which Essentially - I Mean, To Say It In A Sentence, He Describes Elections As Occasions In Which Groups Of Investors Coalesce And Invest To Control The State.

I Like The Cold Weather. It Means You Get Work Done.

Sea Level Rise And Destruction Of Water Resources As Glaciers Melt Alone May Have Horrendous Human Consequences.

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

The [barack] Obama Administration Has Pressured Mexico To Keep Them Away From The Mexican Border, So That They Don't Succeed In Reaching The United States. Pretty Much The Same Thing Europeans Have Done To Turks And Syrians.

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.

The Escalation To Attack Undefended Civilian Targets Is Just A Classic Illustration Of Terrorism.

Syria Is Descending Into Suicide. It's A Horror Story And Getting Worse And Worse. There's No Bright Spot On The Horizon. What Will Probably Happen, If This Continues, Is That Syria Will Be Partitioned Into Probably Three Regions; A Kurdish Region - Which Is Already Forming - That Could Pull Out And Join In Some Fashion The Semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, Maybe With Some Kind Of Deal With Turkey.

There's An Interesting Book Called The Fugu Plan, Written By Marvin Tokayer And Mary Swartz, Which Describes The Circumstances When European Jews Came To Japan, A Semi-feudal Society.

If You Want Information About Sports, I Can Tell You Things From The 1940's, And The Couple Years That My Grandson Was Kind Of A Jock, But Nothing In Between.

If You Look Back To The Anti-intervention Movements, What Were They? Let's Take The Vietnam War - The Biggest Crime Since The Second World War. You Couldn't Be Opposed To The War For Years. The Mainstream Liberal Intellectuals Were Enthusiastically In Support Of The War. In Boston, A Liberal City Where I Was, We Literally Couldn't Have A Public Demonstration Without It Being Violently Broken Up, With The Liberal Press Applauding, Until Late 1966.

Washington Still Refuses To Provide Evidence To Support The Claims In 1990 That A Huge Iraqi Military Build-up On The Saudi Border Justified War.

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

There's A Good Reason Why Nobody Studies History, It Just Teaches You Too Much.

Everything Depends Very Much On Who You Are, What Your Values Are, What Your Commitments Are, What Circumstances You Live In And What Options You're Willing To Undertake, And That Determines What You Ought To Be Doing.

Democracy Is Always Harmful To Elite Interests. Almost By Definition.

I Have Never Suggested Any Principled Difference Between The Natural And Social Sciences.

Isaiah Berlin Described The Intellectuals Of [mikhail] Bakunin's "red Bureaucracy" As A "secular Priesthood.

What Can One Say About A Country Where A Museum Of Science In A Great City Can Feature An Exhibit In Which People Fire Machine Guns From A Helicopter At Vietnamese Huts, With A Light Flashing When A Hit Is Scored? What Can One Say About A Country Where Such An Idea Can Even Be Considered? You Have To Weep For This Country.

The Murder Of Lumumba, In Which The U.s. Was Involved, In The Congo Destroyed Africa's Major Hope For Development. Congo Is Now Total Horror Story, For Years.

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

The Goal Is A Society In Which The Basic Social Unit Is You And Your Television Set. If The Kid Next Door Is Hungry, It’s Not Your Problem. If The Retired Couple Next Door Invested Their Assets Badly And Are Now Starving, That’s Not Your Problem Either.

When Something Like This [2003 Invasion Of Iraq] Takes Place, The International Law Professionals Have A Complicated Task. There Is A Fringe That Just Tells The Truth: Look, It's A Violation Of International Law. But Most Have To Construct Complex Arguments To Justify It As Defense Counsel. That's Basically Their Job, Defense Counsel For State Power.

Nothing Can Justify Crimes Such As Those Of September 11, But We Can Think Of The United States As An Innocent Victim Only If We Adopt The Convenient Path Of Ignoring The Record Of Its Actions And Those Of Its Allies, Which Are, After All, Hardly A Secret.

By Accident Of Geography, The World's Major Oil Resources Are In Shi'ite-dominated Areas. Iran's Oil Is Concentrated Right Near The Gulf, Which Happens To Be An Arab Area, Not Persian. Khuzestan Is Arab, Has Been Loyal To Iran, Fought With Iran Not Iraq During The Iran-iraq War. This Is A Potential Source Of Dissension. I Would Be Amazed If There Isn't An Attempt Going On To Stir Up Secessionist Elements In Khuzestan.

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.

The Number Of People Killed By The Sanctions In Iraq Is Greater Than The Total Number Of People Killed By All Weapons Of Mass Destruction In All Of History.

Mass Destruction

It Was Reported In The Left-wing Press In The Late 1930s That The Texas Company (texaco), Headed By The Nazi Sympathizer Torkild Rieber, Diverted Its Oil Shipments From The Republic, With Which It Had Contracts, To [francisco] Franco.

To Live A Life Of Honesty And Integrity Is A Responsibility Of Every Decent Person.

As The Capacity To Coerce Declines, It Is Natural To Turn To Control Of Opinion As The Basis For Authority And Domination - A Fundamental Principle Of Government Already Emphasized By David Hume.

Growth Is A Funny Sort Of Concept. For Example, Our Gnp Increases Every Time We Build A Prison. Well, Okay, It's Growth In A Sense.

From A Comparative Perspective, The United States Is Unusual If Not Unique In The Lack Of Restraints On Freedom Of Expression. It Is Also Unusual In The Range And Effectiveness Of Methods Employed To Restrain Freedom Of Thought... Where The Voice Of The People Is Heard, Elite Groups Must Insure Their Voice Says The Right Things.

I Happened To Go To A School When I Was A Kid And That's All We Did, Pursue Our Own Interests. It Was Kind Of Structured So You Ended Up Knowing Everything You Were Supposed To Know, Arithmetic, Latin, Whatever It Was. But Almost Always It Was Under Your Own Initiative.

Desktop Publishing Was A Big Innovation That Meant Small Groups Or Even Poor Societies Could Do Their Own Publication Without The Capital Investment In A Major Printing Press. That's A Big Difference. Same Is True Of More Advanced Technologies - It Can Offer Plenty Of Liberatory Possibilities - Can - But Whether It Does Or Not Or Whether It Serves For Coercion Depends On Socioeconomic Decisions.

In The Literal Sense, There Has Been No Relevant Evolution Since The Trek From Africa. But There Has Been Substantial Progress Towards Higher Standards Of Rights, Justice And Freedom - Along With All Too Many Illustrations Of How Remote Is The Goal Of A Decent Society.

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

The Prescription For Endless War Poses A Far Greater Danger To Americans Than Perceived Enemies Do, For Reasons The Terrorist Organisations Understand Very Well.

Nobody Should Have Any Illusions. The United States Has Essentially A One-party System And The Ruling Party Is The Business Party.

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.

A Good Education Instills In You The Intuitive Comprehension - It Becomes Unconscious And Reflexive - That You Just Don't Think Certain Things, Things That Are Threatening To Power Interests.

In Any Case, It Is Better To Have Some Deal Than No Deal, But It's Interesting That Obama Picked The Day Of Implementing Of Iran Deal To Impose New Sanctions On North Korea.

I See No Anti-semitic Implications In Denial Of The Existence Of Gas Chambers, Or Even Denial Of The Holocaust.

The 1980's Was The First Time In The History Of Imperialism That People From The Imperial Society Went In Substantial Numbers To Stay With The Victims In The Hope That Their Presence Would Offer Some Protection And Some Help. These Were Not The Usual Students From Elite Universities. These Were People Straight Out Of Middle America.

I Do Not See How We Can Rationally Oppose High Speed Rail Because Of The Environmental And Other Costs Without Considering The Social And Human Consequences Of The Radical Elimination Of Transportation That This Entails.

I Hope That A Move Toward Clemency With Judge Afiuni Would Be A Step Towards The Importance Of Maintaining A Properly Functioning Justice System.

My Feeling Is That If Any Republican Was Elected It Would Be Almost A Death Knell For The Species Literally, Just Because Of Their Attitude On Climate Change.

Intellectuals Are In A Position To Expose The Lies Of Governments, To Analyze Actions According To Their Causes And Motives And Often Hidden Intentions.

Dissidents Are Not Imprisoned As In The Domains Of The Kremlin, In The Old Days. They Do Not Have Their Brains Blown Out By Elite Forces Armed And Trained By The Reigning Superpower, As Happens In Washington's Domains - With No Particular Concern At Home - An Important Fact, One Of Many That Help Us Learn About Ourselves, If We Choose.

There Are Two Parties, So-called, But They're Really Factions Of The Same Party, The Business Party.

As A Research Tool, The Internet Is Invaluable.

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.

I Listen To Talk Radio A Lot And It's Kind Of Interesting. If You Can Sort Of Suspend Your Knowledge Of The World And Just Enter Into The World Of The People Who Are Calling In, You Can Understand Them.

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.

As We [with Edward Herman] Discuss There [in Manufacturing Consent] And Elsewhere, Recognition Of The Importance Of "manufacturing Consent" Has Become An Ever More Central Theme In The More Free Societies.

The 'corporatization Of America' During The Past Century Has Been An Attack On Democracy.

People Have To Be Atomized And Segregated And Alone. They're Not Supposed To Organize, Because Then They Might Be Something Beyond Spectators Of Action. They Might Actually Be Participants If Many People With Limited Resources Could Get Together To Enter The Political Arena. That's Really Threatening.

If [climate Change ] Became A Serious Proposal In The United States, There Would Be A Huge Propaganda Onslaught By The Business Community, The Energy Corporations And Many Others, To Try To Frighten The Population Into Opposing It - Claiming That If They Have It, All Sorts Of Terrible Things Will Happen, Like You Won't Be Able To Heat Your Home, Or Whatever The Story Is.

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.

I Think There Are Real Possibilities Of Reaching Out To Many Of The Trump Voters, Those Who Voted For Obama Believing His Rhetoric.

There Is A Reason Why Nelson Mandela Went To Cuba To Praise Castro And Thank The Cuban People Almost As Soon As He Got Out Of Jail. That's A Third World Reaction And They Understand It. Cuba Played An Enormous Role In The Liberation Of Africa And The Overthrow Of Apartheid, Sending Doctors And Teachers To The Poorest Places In The World, To Haiti, To Pakistan After The Earthquake, Almost Everywhere. The Internationalism Is Just Astonishing. I Don't Think There Has Been Anything Like It In History.

In Fact, The Outer Space Treaty Of 1967 Bans Militarization. Potential Adversaries Of The Us, And Even Its Allies, Are So Far Behind That These Countries Are Very Interested In Maintaining The Treaty. Europe And The Rest Of The World Want A Strong Reaffirmation Of The Treaty And The Us Is Unilaterally Trying To Derail It. Termination Of The Treaty Would Mean That The Us Could Develop Satellite Weapons, Put Offensive Weapons In Space. It Would Probably Mean Using Nuclear Power In Space. All Of This Leads To Some Very Dangerous Scenarios, Including Destruction Of The Species.

The House Of Representatives, Which Was Closer To The Population, Had Much Less Power. The Executive Was More Or Less An Administrator, Not An Emperor Like Today.

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

My Memory - Faded, As I Say - Is That Paul Johnson Was Trying To Vilify All Intellectuals Who Were At All Critical Of The States He Worships, And Of Power Generally (except, Of Course, The Power Of Enemies, Which We Must Denounce, Imitating The Commissars Who Are His Models, Though He Doesn't Understand It).

During The 1990's, Colombia Was The Leading Recipient Of Us Military Aid And Training In The Hemisphere. Approximately Half Of All Us Aid In The Hemisphere Went To Colombia. Colombia Was Also Far And Away The Leading Human Rights Violator In The Hemisphere.

The Bush Administration Has Created An Unimaginable Catastrophe In Iraq. This Should've Been One Of The Easiest Military Occupations In History And They Succeeded In Turning It Into One Of The Worst Military Disasters In History. They Can't Control It And It's Almost Impossible For Them To Get Out For Reasons You Can't Discuss In The United States Because To Discuss The Reasons Why They Can't Get Out Would Be To Concede The Reasons Why They Invaded.

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

What Was The Invasion Of South Vietnam, For Example, In 1962, When Kennedy Sent The Air Force To Bomb South Vietnam And Start Chemical Warfare? That's Aggression.

In Mexico, A Poor Country, Higher Education Is Of Quite Good Quality -- And Is Free. Ten Years Ago The Government Tried To Impose Small Fees. There Was A National Student Strike And The Government Backed Down. High Tuition Is Not An Economic Necessity, As Is Easy To Show, But A Debt Trap Is A Good Technique Of Indoctrination And Control. And Resisting This Makes Good Sense.

It's As If We're Higher Apes Who Had A Language Faculty Inserted.

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

If Anybody Thinks They Should Listen To Me Because I'm A Professor At Mit, That's Nonsense. You Should Decide Whether Something Makes Sense By Its Content, Not By The Letters After The Name Of The Person Who Says It.

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

The Us Stole Texas From Mexico By Violence, Then Invaded Mexico On Ludicrous Pretexts And Conquered Half Of It, What Is Now The Southwest And Far West. That's Why Cities Have Spanish Names: San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Etc. All Of This Is Suppressed In Standard American History. But The Victims Remember. The Conquerors Typically Have One History, The Victims A Different One - And Often A More Accurate One.

With Regard To Freedom Of Expression There Are Basically Two Positions: You Defend It Vigorously For Views You Hate, Or You Reject It In Favor Of Stalinist/fascist Standards.

Markets Have Built In Inefficiencies, Serious Inefficiencies Which Are Well Known.

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.

But, That’s The Whole Point Of Corporatization - To Try To Remove The Public From Making Decisions Over Their Own Fate, To Limit The Public Arena, To Control Opinion, To Make Sure That The Fundamental Decisions That Determine How The World Is Going To Be Run - Which Includes Production, Commerce, Distribution, Thought, Social Policy, Foreign Policy, Everything - Are Not In The Hands Of The Public, But Rather In The Hands Of Highly Concentrated Private Power. In Effect, Tyranny Unaccountable To The Public.

There's Just No Question That The United States Was Trying Desperately To Prevent The Independence Of South Vietnam And To Prevent A Political Settlement Inside South Vietnam. And In Fact It Went To War Precisely To Prevent That. It Finally Bombed The North In 1965 With The Purpose Of Trying To Get The North To Use Its Influence To Call Off The Insurgency In The South.

A 1998 Study Was Done In Hebrew By An Israeli Scholar, Yosef Grodzinsky, And The English Translation Of The Title Is Good Human Material. That's What They Wanted Sent To Palestine For Colonization And For The Eventual Conflict That Took Place Some Years Later. These Policies Were Somewhat Complementary To The U.s. Policy Of Pressuring England To Allow Jews To Go To Palestine, But Not Allowing Them Here. The British Politician Ernest Bevin Was Quite Bitter About It, Asking, "if You Want To Save The Jews, Why Send Them To Palestine When You Don't Admit Them?"

Scientists Generally, Not Just Evolutionary Biologists, Don't Take Much For Granted.

I Know Of Only One Country, At Least To My Knowledge, Which Has A Dissident Culture Where Leading Figures, I Mean, The Most Famous Writers, Journalists, Academics And So On, Are Not Only Critical Of State Policy, But Are Constantly Carrying Out Civil Disobedience And Risking Imprisonment And Often Being Imprisoned, Standing Up For People's Rights. That's Turkey.

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.

I Think A Decent Society Should Protect Rights To Private Property Within Limits, But Not Concentrations Of Private Power That Infringe On The Freedom And Rights Of Others, Including Exploitation Of Labor, And That Convert Any Democratic Forms Into What Have Been Called Sometimes "hierarchical Democracies," Like Ours, In Which Some Have Vastly Greater Influence Over Public Policy Than Others. Spelling All Of This Out Is A Complex Matter That Raises Many Issue And Problems That Are Impossible To Address Here.

The Us And Europe Are Committing Suicide In Different Ways. In Europe It's Austerity In The Midst Of Recession And That's Guaranteed To Be A Disaster. There's Some Resistance To That Now. In The Us, It's Essentially Off-shoring Production And Financialization And Getting Rid Of Superfluous Population Through Incarceration.

A Very Large Majority Of The U.s. Population Is In Favor Of Establishing Diplomatic Relations With Cuba And Has Been For A Long Time With Some Fluctuations. And Even Part Of The Business World Is In Favor Of It, Too. But The Government Won't Allow It.

Hence, A Generative Grammar Must Be A System Of Rules That Can Iterate To Generate An Indefinitely Large Number Of Structures. This System Of Rules Can Be Analyzed Into The Three Major Components Of A Generative Grammar: The Syntactic, Phonological, And Semantic Components... The Syntactic Component Of A Grammar Must Specify, For Each Sentence, A Deep Structure That Determines Its Semantic Interpretation And A Surface Structure That Determines Its Phonetic Interpretation. The First Of These Is Interpreted By The Semantic Component; The Second, By The Phonological Component.

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

All Over The Place, From The Popular Culture To The Propaganda System, There Is Constant Pressure To Make People Feel That They Are Helpless, That The Only Role They Can Have Is To Ratify Decisions And To Consume.

It Is Important To Bear In Mind That Political Campaigns Are Designed By The Same People Who Sell Toothpaste And Cars.

The Us Is Also Unusual In The Enormous Scale Of Religious Fundamentalism. The Impact On Understanding Of The World Is Extraordinary. In National Polls Almost Half Of Those Surveyed Have Reported That They Believe That God Created Humans In Their Present Form 10,000 Years Ago (or Less) And That Man Shares No Common Ancestor With The Ape. There Are Similar Beliefs About The Second Coming.

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.

Independent Development Can Be A Virus That Can Infect Others.

There Certainly Are Those Who Worship The State Much As Divinities Are Worshipped. Not Just The State But Even Leaders.

Europe Is Being Subjected To The Kinds Of Programs That Devastated Latin America For Many Years. Latin America Has Thrown Them Out And Is Pulling Out: It's Successful; It's Democratizing; It's Economically Developing; And It's Free From The Shrapnel Of Us Imperialism For 25 Years. Meanwhile, Western Europe Is Destroying Itself Systematically, Destroying Itself Going In The Opposite Direction.

Around 2008 And Again In 2013 Nato Officially Offered The Ukraine The Opportunity To Join Nato. That's Something No Russian Government Is Ever Going To Accept. It's Right At The Geopolitical Heartland Of Russia.

The Intellectual World Is Deeply Conformist... We Talk A Lot About The Crimes Of Others. When It Comes To Our Own Crimes, We Are Nationalists In The Orwellian Sense.

There Was Very Little International Support, Even England Wouldn't Support [bombing Of Syria], Which Is Amazing.

I Think That Has A Lot Of Dangers, As Does Government Surveillance, Which Is Way Too High.

State Formation Has Been A Brutal Project, With Many Hideous Consequences. But The Results Exist, And Their Pernicious Aspects Should Be Overcome.

If You Are Giving A Graduate Course You Don't Try To Impress The Students With Oratory, You Try To Challenge Them, Get Them To Question You.

Those Who Actually Do Have A Valid Claim To Such Special Competence Have A Particular Obligation To Make Very Clear To The General Public The Limits Of What Is Understood At Any Serious Level; These Limits Are Typically Very Narrow In Matters Of Significance In Human Affairs.

Technology Is Usually Fairly Neutral. It’s Like A Hammer, Which Can Be Used To Build A House Or To Destroy Someone’s Home. The Hammer Doesn’t Care. It Is Almost Always Up To Us To Determine Whether The Technology Is Good Or Bad.

A Property Of An Organism Enters Into Its Life (and Survival) In Many Different Ways, Some More Salient Than Others. But There Is No Simple Notion Of Its Being "for" Some Function.

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

The Ideal Is To Create A Completely Fragmented Atomized Society Where Everybody Is Totally Alone, Doing Nothing But Trying To Pursue Created Wants, And The Wants Are Created.

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.

It Is A Virtual Reflex For Governments To Plead Security Concerns When They Undertake Any Controversial Action, Often As A Pretext For Something Else.

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.

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.

It Doesn't Matter What We Cover, It Matters What You Discover.

The Free Market Is 'socialism' For The Rich: The Public Pays The Costs And The Rich Get The Benefit - Markets For The Poor And Plenty Of State Protection For The Rich.

The Beam In Our Own Eye Is Harder To Detect, Although - Or More Accurately Because - To Detect It, And Remove It, Is Vastly More Important On Elementary Moral Grounds, And Commonly More Important In Terms Of Direct Human Consequences As Well. Intellectuals Have Historically Played A Critical Function In Performing These Tasks, And [ivan] Illich Is Right To Observe That Claims To Scientific Expertise And Special Knowledge Are Often Used As A Device.

There Are Very Interesting Books About These Events, For Instance One By A Very Well-known American Historian Named William R. Polk Called Violent Politics. It's A Record Of What Are Basically Guerrilla Wars From The American Revolution Right Up Through The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq.

As Elite Attitudes Towards Public Education Over Time Illustrate, Simple Formulas Are Far From Adequate. There Are Conflicting Tendencies.

The Process Of Shaping Opinion, Attitudes, And Perceptions Was Termed The 'engineering Of Consent' By One Of The Founders Of The Modern Public Relations Industry, Edward Bernays.

What The Public Wants Is Called 'politically Unrealistic.' Translated Into English, That Means Power And Privilege Are Opposed To It.

Stock Ownership In The Us Is Very Highly Concentrated. [shareholder Actions Are] Something, But It's Like The Old Communist Party In The Ussr, It Would Be Nice To See More Protest Inside The Communist Party But It's Not Democracy. It's Not Going To Happen. [shareholder Actions] Are A Good Step, But They're Mostly Symbolic.

The Social System Is Taking On A Form In Which Finding Out What You Want To Do Is Less And Less Of An Option Because Your Life Is Too Structured, Organised, Controlled And Disciplined.

What's Called Obamacare Is An Effort To Mildly Change This [health-care System], Not Change It As Far As It Should Go Or As Much As The Population Wants It To Go, But To Make It A Little Better And A Little More Affordable.

I Should Say That Canada Is One Of The Major Criminals, Not Just The Tar Sands And So On, But Even Mining Throughout The World, A Lot Of It Is Canadian. It's Extremely Destructive, So An Important Thing For Canadians To Do Is Curtail The Predatory And Destructive Behavior Of Their Own Government And Corporations. A Carbon Tax Is One Way Of Doing It.

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

Unlimited Economic Growth Has The Marvelous Quality Of Stilling Discontent While Maintaining Privilege, A Fact That Has Not Gone Unnoticed Among Liberal Economists.

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.

The More There Is A Need To Talk About The Ideals Of Democracy, The Less Democratic The System Usually Is.

If Something Comes Along That You Don't Like, There Are A Few Sort Of Four-letter Words That You Can Use To Push It Out Of The Sphere Of Discussion. If You Were In A Bar Downtown, They Might Have Different Words, But If You're An Educated Person What You Use Are Complicated Words Like "conspiracy Theory" Or "marxist." It's A Way Of Pushing Unpleasant Questions Off The Agenda So That We Can Continue In Our Own Happy Ideology.

If You Sell Me A Car, We Have Perhaps Made A Good Bargain For Ourselves. But There Are Effects Of This Transaction On Others, Which We Do Not Take Into Account. There Is More Pollution, The Price Of Gas Goes Up, There Is More Congestion.

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.

We Must Present A National Persona Of Being Irrational And Vindictive, Because That's Going To Terrify People. And Then, They'll Back Off. And This Is Not [donald] Trump, This Is [bill] Clinton. It's Not [richard] Nixon, You Know. We Have To Be Irrational And Vindictive, Because That's Going To Frighten People.

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

No One Seriously Doubts That If Piraha Children Are Brought Up In Boston They'll Be Speaking Boston English, That Is, That The Capacities Are Present, Unlike Other Animals, As Far As Is Known. There's No Challenge To The Theory - Not Mine, But Everyone's - That The Human Language Faculty Provides The Means For Generation Of An Infinite Array Of Structured Expressions.

Like Most Technology, The Internet Has Mixed Effects. It's A Neutral Instrument.

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

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

One Measure For Promoting Both Stability And Fairness Across Financial Market Segments Is A Small Sales Tax On All Financial Transactions.

If You're In Favour Of Any Policy - Reform, Revolution, Stability, Regression, Whatever - If You're At Least Minimally Moral, It's Because You Think It's Somehow Good For People. And Good For People Means Conforming To Their Fundamental Nature.

Citizens Of The Democratic Societies Should Undertake A Course Of Intellectual Self Defense To Protect Themselves From Manipulation And Control, And To Lay The Basis For Meaningful Democracy.

If You Take An Economics Or A Political Science Course, You're Taught That Humans Are Supposed To Be Rational Wealth Accumulators, Each Acting As An Individual To Maximize His Own Wealth In The Market.

The Iraq War Is The First War In History, In Which There Were Huge Demonstrations Before The War Was Launched, Not Beginning Five Years Later And Then Being Broken Up. All Of These Are Changes, And The People Who Are Writing In Journals Today Lived Through These Changes.

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.

It [the Internet] Should Be Publicly Controlled But Washington Is Not A System Of Public Control, It's Mainly A System Of Corporate Control. We Ought To Have A Free Internet, But That Means Having A Free Society, And There Is Fundamental Questions There.

It’s A Shameful Moment For U.s. Media When It Insists On Being Subservient To The Grotesque Propaganda Agencies Of A Violent, Aggressive State.

For Thirty Years, Isreal Has Been Highjacking Ships In International Waters, Killing People, Taking Hostages, Bringing Them To Israel, Putting Them In Secret Prisons, All With The Help Of The United States. That's Serious Piracy.

The U.s. Is, To A Very Unusual Extent, A Business-run Society.

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.

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

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.

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.

Responsibility, I Believe, Accrues Through Privilege.

From Now On I Will Consider A Language To Be A Set (finite Or Infinite) Of Sentences, Each Finite In Length And Constructed Out Ofa Finite Set Of Elements. All Natural Languages In Their Spoken Or Written Form Are Languages In This Sense.

There's Something Deeply Rooted In American Culture. You Can Pretty Much Identify What It Was. You Take A Look At The History. It Was Internal Conquest. You Had To Defend Yourself Against What The Declaration Of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, An Enlightened Figure, Called The Attacks Of The "merciless Indian Savages," Whose Known Way Of Warfare Was Torture And Destruction. Also You Had A Slave Population, You Had To Protect Yourself Against Them. You Needed Guns.

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

In Fact, Clinton-era Publications Of The Us Space Command Describe Control Over Space As A Parallel To Control Over The Oceans A Century Ago. Then, Countries Built Navies To Protect And Enhance Their Power In Commercial And Strategic Interests. Today, The Militarization Of Space Is Intended To Protect Us Investments And Commercial Interest And Us Hegemony Around The World.

These Are Questions For Action, Not Speculation, Which Is Idle.

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.

America Is A Very Fundamentalist Society. It's Like Iran In The Degree Of Fanatic Religious Commitment.

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

In General, We Should Be Able To Agree That Those Who Have Greater Opportunities And Face Fewer Impediments Have A Greater Responsibility To Do More To Help Achieve Such Ends.

For The Past Century Or So That's [ Monroe Doctrine] Actually Been True, But It's Declining Very Significantly.

Regulate The Banks, Get Money Out Of Elections; Raise The Minimum Wage, Environmental Issues. They're All Very Important And The Occupy Movement Made A Difference. It Shifted Not Only The Discourse But To Some Extent, Action On These Issues.

We Are Entering A Period Of Human History That May Provide An Answer To The Question Of Whether It Is Better To Be Smart Than Stupid.

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