Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomskyis an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 December 1928
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
In November 2007, the White House issued a Declaration of Principles demanding that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors.
The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.
Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.
Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled.
Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.
The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.
Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.
As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege
In Egypt, on the eve of Tahrir Square, there was a major poll which found that overwhelmingly - 80-90%, numbers like that - Egyptians regarded the main threats they face as the U.S. and Israel. They don't like Iran - Arabs generally don't like Iran - but they didn't consider it a threat.
In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti - France and the United States - combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.
In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.
In 1963, the U.N. Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures - sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns - some organized by popular movements.
In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.
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.