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May. 14 2009 - 11:41 am | 416 views | 1 recommendation | 0 comments

Chomsky on education, South America, and

Pakistan
By ALLISON KILKENNY

Citizen Radio recently interviewed Noam Chomsky. You can

listen to the full interview here.

As promised, here is the full transcript. Feel free to repost and sample as
desired, but please credit Citizen Radio for the interview.

Citizen Radio opened the interview by discussing the tea-bagger

phenomenon and “popular anger” at the government.
Kilstein: [If Barack Obama is] neutral and doesn’t do anything radical, so
let’s say by the next election, we don’t have universal health care, or we’re not
out of the slump. Do you think that this was kind of our chance, and do you
think that if things are, let’s say, the same – stagnate – that [Republicans will]
just be able to use that and completely…

Chomsky: Well, I think if people are still feeling – I mean they have a very
good reason to feel that something’s wrong. There’s a reason why 80% of the
country thinks it’s going the wrong way. It’s been the worst period of economic
history.

Kilkenny: But it’s just misdirected.

Chomsky: Well, it’s misdirected, but you could say the same thing about Nazi
Germany. You know, it wasn’t the Jews…and in this case, it’s even more
plausible. If it’s the rich liberals who own Wall Street, and run the
government, and run the media, give everything to the illegal immigrants,
don’t care about us sort of “fly-by” people, and that sort of thing.

Kilkenny: But at the same time, it’s also “Socialism,” the fear of Socialism. So
you have the fear of the rich-

Chomsky: It’s the rich. [laughter]

Kilstein: That’s kind of a massive contradiction.

Kilkenny: Sure

Chomsky: It’s no more crazy than the belief – the very widespread belief on
the left – that the Republicans stand for free markets, which is totally
ridiculous. Reagan was the most protectionist president in post-war American
history. But it’s kind of drummed into your head over and over. I read it even
in the left journals.

Kilstein: Last time we talked a lot about religion and economics, and first of
all, thanks for doing the show so soon again. We want to rename the show
“Chomsky and Friends” [laughter]

Kilkenny: Leach off your name

Kilstein: Every time you’re not on just say, “He’s not feeling well today.” I’ve
heard you talk a lot about how a lot of the people you grew up with didn’t have
a high school education. You’ve often said that they were just as educated as
the people you went to Harvard with, or you met at Harvard, and these kind of
higher institutions, and I wanted you to talk about the difference between self-
education and formal education, and how a lot of the times formal education
can lead to apathy.

And the second part of the question is for someone whose new to politics,
which a lot of our audience is because they were sort of disenfranchised the
media, and what not, where a good place to start is because I think sometimes
when you want to get into it, you’re so overwhelmed, and you just feel like
you’re being lied to, and you just don’t know where to begin.

Chomsky: It’s pretty much the same answer in both cases. It wasn’t self-
education. These were my unemployed, working class relatives. They were
parts of organizations. A lot of them were in the Communist party. We
misinterpret the Communist party as a result of decades of propaganda. For
them, the Communist party didn’t have that much to do with Russia. Yeah,
okay, so they said some things about Russia, but they really didn’t care. It had
to do with unemployment, with civil rights. For my seamstress aunts, it was a
place they had a social life. They could spend some place in the summer for a
week. They had educational activities, cultural activities, so it was kind of a
community. A community, bound together not by ethnicity, or having been
through the Second World War, or something, but by common ideals. And
they were progressive ideals. The unions were very intimately related to it.

In that general milieu that these people grew up and became educated. But it’s
not really self-education. It’s mutual education in a culture of support and
creativity. And remember too that in those days, unlike now, left intellectuals
(many of them Communist party intellectuals, famous physicists and
mathematicians, and so on) were involved in popular education. They were
writing really good books worth reading today like Mathematics for the
Millions, J.D. Bernal’s books on physics, and so on. It was just part of an
interrelated culture that involved left intellectuals and working class people,
some of whom had very little in the way of formal education. Some got
through high school, but some didn’t even get through elementary school.
Even there, it was self-education, but in a community – a community of
emigrants, left emigrants fleeing from Europe, who would hang around these
groups. One of them was one of my uncles, who never did get past fourth
grade. He had a newsstand. He was disabled, so under the New Deal
programs, he was able to get a newsstand. But it just became a center for
émigré, educated émigré life. Psychiatrists, doctors, professionals, they would
hang around, and he was a bright guy, they liked him, and would have
discussions. He ended up getting quite an education.

Kilstein: Do you see anything similar to those groups today? Or do you think
if you don’t have a college education, if you don’t have a high school education,
do you think it’s possible to obtain that kind of knowledge by reading, or do
you think there really is something to a support group and gathering?

Chomsky: Doing these things alone is extremely hard. There’s been a huge
effort – I don’t know if it can be called propaganda – the whole doctrinal
system is geared towards atomization. You know, be out for yourself, get as
much as you can in the way of consumer goods, and forget about everything
else. But it means there’s very little in the way of community. You can see it in
all kinds of ways. Say care for the elderly. In those days, it was just taken for
granted. People get older; they live with their families instead of in nursing
homes. My grandfather lived with his daughter until he was 95. He was totally
impossible, but they just worked it out and the family took care of him. But
you were part of a group, and I think there still are pockets of ethnic
communities that are like that. But these were not just ethnic. They were also
– especially the ones I’ve been talking about – social, cultural, political, and so
on. All of that’s been torn apart. People are very much alone, and on your own,
it’s extremely hard to do anything.

And that goes back to your other question: Where do I start? If somebody
comes in here and says, “I’m interested in biology. Where do I start?” You
can’t start alone. You can’t start reading every biology journal in the world.
You have to know what you’re looking for. You have to develop a framework of
understanding, and that takes interaction. That’s how science works. Take the
work on this floor [at MIT] or almost anywhere here, take a look around.
People are working together. You go out to the room there, you’ll see one guy
standing at a blackboard, and another guy talking to him, stuff like that. You
work things out together. Maybe Einstein could do it himself, but even that
wasn’t true. There was a very complex community including his wife who did a
lot of the stuff, but it’s very hard to be thrown into a complicated world and
say, “Where do I start?” And if there are real, live social structures that you can
be a part of, you can work at your own ideas, hear what other people have to
say…that’s how a democracy – that’s what unions were in many ways.

Part of the passion about breaking unions, which is overwhelming, is it does

leave people alone. Even unions in the United States, which is distinct from
other countries, had this highly self-centered character to it. You can see it in
the breakdown of the healthcare system.

Take Canada and the United States, very similar societies. Canada has a
functioning national healthcare system. The United States is alone in the
industrial world in that it doesn’t. Part of the reason for that is the difference
in the ways the unions acted. If you go back to the initiation of the healthcare
system in Canada came from the labor unions. Except, what they fought for is
healthcare for everyone. The American unions fought for healthcare for
themselves. So UAW got a good social welfare package: healthcare, pension,
stuff like that, for themselves. Not for anyone else. Part of this deep
indoctrination into “We’re all in it together,” “no class struggle,” there’s only
one group of people who are highly class conscience: business. So they’re
always fighting a bitter class war. But everyone else is supposed to be classless.
The unions were willing to just trust management. Since we’re all in it
together, you guys will take care of us. Well, you can see what happened.
Management decides, “Sorry, game’s over.” They ended up with nothing. If
they had worked for social welfare for everyone, it wouldn’t be a utopia, but at
least there would be some functioning system for everyone.

My own feeling is that’s part of the reason why there’s such a constant effort to
try to malign and undermine social security. For example, a lot of young
people think that it’s unfair that they have to pay for elderly people, which is
true. Social security takes money from working people and gives it to elderly
people. Now, any civilized society would say that’s very fair. They were
working, they took care of you when you were young, why shouldn’t you take
care of them when they’re old? This sense of immoralism is really driven into
people. In fact, a lot of young people think they’ll never get social security
because they’re drowned in propaganda about how the system’s collapsing-

Kilkenny: So we have to privatize it.

Chomsky: …but it’s as healthy as it ever is. Tweak it a little, it’ll go on forever.
There’s a constant effort to privatize it, get rid of it, and I think part of the
reason is that social security is residue of that sense of community that was
alive in the 30s. You really should take care of each other. Form the CIO, that’s
for everybody, not just me. Labor slogans are: Solidarity, not: I Gotta Get
What I Want. Social security fortifies it. It relies on it, and also fortifies it.
From the point of view of the class warriors in the business world, that’s
dangerous. You really want people to be atomized. If they’re atomized, they’re
controlled. You can’t control people by force anymore, but you can get them to
focus on nothing but maxing out five credit cards, okay you got them under
control. They don’t talk to anybody. They have no ideas. They don’t think you
can do anything. If you want to talk about American exceptionalism, that’s
what it is.

Kilstein: That would be an awful UAW slogan: “I Gotta Get What I Want.”
[laughter]

Chomsky: And now they’re stuck with it. There was a time around 1979, or
so, when Doug Fraser, the head of UAW – You know, UAW was getting
smashed for something or other, I forget for what, he came out saying, you
know, I never realized this before, but you, management, you’re fighting a
class war. And sure, they’re always fighting a class war. They’re vulgar
Marxists, basically. But everyone else is supposed to think it’s classless.
Harmony. Americanism. That kind of stuff.

Kilkenny: Speaking of American exceptionalism, America always likes to

present itself as this great democracy, but in fact, in South America, we see
actual democratic movements happening. What do you think the central
difference is between an American culture where we vote to uphold leader that
don’t really represent us, and a South American culture where leaders
represent the people?
Chomsky: I think the most democratic country in the world right now is
Bolivia. So the United States is trying hard to undermine it. But if you think
about what happened in Bolivia in the last ten years, it’s pretty astonishing.
The most repressed population in the hemisphere (the indigenous
population), which happens to be the majority, and has been totally
marginalized for 500 years, ever since the Spanish, they managed to get
themselves organized, active, and elected a president from their own ranks.
Not some rich guy. They elected a poor farmer. They developed programs, and
the programs are serious, everybody knows what they are. You’re not waiting
for some leader to tell you, “Here’s the programs.” On crucial issues: cultural
rights, justice, multiculturalism, control of natural resources, really basic
things. And furthermore, election is just one day in an ongoing process. On
that day, you push the levers, but then you go back to the struggle you were
part of before, struggles against privatization of water, and all sorts of things.
That’s real, functioning democracy. So of course, the old elites are trying to
break it up, and the U.S. is supporting it. We don’t know exactly how much
because USAID will not release information on who its funding, but you can
be pretty sure that it’s funding the quasi-secessionist sort of mostly white
elites in the eastern provinces to try to break up the system of democracy.

And our system is almost the opposite. Policies don’t come from the public.
They come from above. The public isn’t supposed to know about them, and
usually doesn’t. So campaigns are run so they keep away from issues and talk
about personalities, body language, and rhetoric, and that sort of thing. The
front page of the New York Times has pictures of Michelle Obama wearing a
designer dress in the morning, and a different one in the afternoon. That’s
what you’re supposed to be interested in, not what’s happening with
healthcare, and what’s happening is extremely interesting.

I don’t know if you saw this, there’s a Senate committee – a [Max Baucus (D-
MO) committee – which is meeting on healthcare, and they had a session
several days ago, which fortunately was filmed by CSPAN.

Kilkenny: We say that. The protesters.

Chomsky: I asked a friend who does database research…no coverage. It was

astonishing. Here’s health care reform. The only people who testified-
Kilkenny: The blogs picked up on it. The mainstream media ignored it
entirely.

Kilstein: Just watching the Senators laugh at them.

Kilkenny: Actually, I forget what Senator it was, but he said, “We need more
police.” And everybody laughed. They thought it was great.

Chomsky: I didn’t see it, but people told me about it. That sounds incredible.
And that’s the Obama administration. That’s our kind of democracy. It’s none
of your business. And these guys are doctors, after all. They’re not just the
general population, though they do represent the general population. The
polls for fifty years have shown that a large majority is in favor of [healthcare
reform], but they’re not part of the system. In fact, it’s even interesting in the
way that the Obama campaign, and the media, have pictured Obama’s populist
triumph. There were articles, after the election, that talked about how he had
this army of people he’d mobilized, and so on. But the tone of them, at least
the ones I saw, including the campaign itself, was that this is really important,
now the Obama army is awaiting instructions. We’re going to tell you, “Here’s
the next thing on our agenda. You go out and push the doorbells. Push for
brand Obama.” That’s what they call it, in fact. That’s a straight totalitarian
concept. But that’s called a new model of democracy here. Even the primaries
work that way.

Kilkenny: So why do you think in Bolivia they could see how democracy
works?

Chomsky: For one thing, they’ve been fighting about it for 70 years. It goes
way back. They had a very radical tin miner’s union. In fact, they technically
had a Trotskyite government in the late 40s and early 50s. The U.S. managed
to co-opt it in various ways.

It’s kind of interesting, if you look back at the history. In the late 40s, the
internal U.S. records identify two major problems in Latin America. One was
Bolivia and one was Guatemala. In both countries, which had traditionally
been nice dictatorships, there were bad things happening. In Bolivia, it was
the tin miner’s union. In Guatemala, they had the first signs of democratic
revival ever. It was about the same problem in both cases. But the government
reacted to them in different ways. In Guatemala, they just threw out the
government and imposed a military dictatorship. In Bolivia, they realized –
correctly, as it turned out – that they could co-opt the government. They acted
in a supportive manner toward the government by bringing them into the U.S.
system and separating them away from their working class base, and giving
them privileges, and so on. It ended up a dictatorship, and the two systems
ended up the same way, but with different techniques. And those were the two
problems because both of them had democratic movements. It was just
understood. You can’t tolerate that. What’s different now is that the U.S. can’t
do much about it. It’s forced now to accept governments that it would have
overthrown 40 years ago.

Kilkenny: When Evo Morales is on The Daily Show, it makes it difficult to

disappear him.

Chomsky: Well, [Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil’s] positions aren’t very
different from the Brazilian government that the Kennedy administration
organized a coup to overthrow. It’s just that now the U.S. doesn’t have the
power to do it. And it’s a little on another level. It’s kind of like what we were
talking about before. The countries are getting organized, and they’re even
getting integrated for the first time. Latin America has been very separated. I
mean, road systems, everything else, but there’s a move towards integration,
and that’s a prerequisite for independence just as in personal life social
organizations are kind of a prerequisite for independence of thought.

And also they have other options now that they didn’t have like China’s an
option. The European Union’s an option. Trade is diversifying. Other
connections are diversifying. The U.S. has basically weakened its two main
weapons: one was violence (overthrow the government) and the other was
economic strangulation, which doesn’t work as easily so the U.S. is compelled
to tolerate and even pretend to approve of governments it would have opposed
like Brazil.

Kilstein: My next question was about the twenty-four hour news networks,
but just to tie it into this real quick, do you think that maybe part of the reason
in places like Bolivia they did accomplish everything they did, and the people
worked together, is because they didn’t have this kind of twenty-four hour
news network either just throwing out propaganda, or having them scared
about swine flu instead of health insurance, and they just didn’t have that
constant barrage of fear and government memos?

Chomsky: If you look at the media – I don’t know about Bolivia specifically –
but in most of Latin America, the media are very right wing. Venezuela must
be the only country in the world where the major media not only oppose the
government but want them hung and quartered. You don’t have media like
that in any other country. But that’s been true in Latin America for a long time
because it’s the nature of the societies. There’s a very high concentration of
wealth, huge poverty, and the media is in the hands of the rich. So, yes, of
course they’re ultra-right wing. How much they reach the population, I don’t
know.

Kilstein: I guess it is just us [laughter]

Chomsky: I’ve been told that radio and television are even worse. I’ve looked
at the print media.

Kilstein: I wanted to ask you about our media. We were watching the pretty
famous debate between you and William F. Buckley, and right afterwards– the
contrast was really weird – right afterwards we watched Keith Olbermann on
MSNBC, who is kind of known as the left’s hero now, but he’s never actually
debated anyone with opposing views on his show, and I wanted to ask do you
see the new liberal pundits like on MSNBC for example as being either
important as kind of conduits of information that we might not hear on other
news networks, or do you see them as left wing versions of FOX news, and a
substitute for actual independent journalism?

Chomsky: I really can’t say because I’ve never seen them. [laughter]

Kilstein: That may be for the best.

Kilkenny: Yeah, I think it is.

Chomsky: I think they’re on cable.

Kilstein: Yeah, they are. No, that’s better. We’ll go with that.
Chomsky: I hear about them from friends.

Kilstein: Well, it’s this really bizarre thing where they kind of just do the
same thing that the right does where instead of actually going out and doing
journalism like say an Amy Goodman, and bloggers like Glenn Greenwald,
they instead just kind of make fun of the right wing like FOX News makes fun
of us. And then, I think the scariest problem is now everybody kind of assumes
we have our liberal voices, right? But because they’re on MSNBC, and because
they’re owned and their bosses are these giant corporations, by default there
are going to be some things that they aren’t allowed to say, so it kind of puts us
at ease because we have our voices but then-

Chomsky: Do they interview left wing activists?

Kilkenny: Never activists. They’ll have left wing personalities, so like a comic
whose left wing, but never a Greenpeace activist or anything.

Chomsky: People like Howard Zinn?

Kilkenny: No, certainly not Howard Zinn.

Chomsky: See, that’s the difference with – you know, Amy you get
information from. It’s not just that she makes fun of somebody. She doesn’t
make fun of people. She says, look, here’s thing you don’t know about. Why
are there Somali pirates? If toxic wastes are being dumped in the water, and
the multinationals are fishing out the waters illegally, then yeah, people have
to survive. You certainly don’t hear that in the press.

Kilstein: No, it’s the opposite. One of our biggest left wing people, Rachel
Maddow, whose very liberal on social issues, so people just kind of assume
she’s gentle, when the pirates came up, she—

Kilkenny: It was gross. It was just Navy Seal worship.

Chomsky: Really?

Kilkenny: Yeah, showing the graphics of [the Seals] shooting [the pirates] in
the heads.
Chomsky: That’s kind of an interesting case because there’s quite a
background there. Part of it, which I think Amy did show — I didn’t see it, but
people told me she showed it – was that it’s the direct result of illegal
overfishing and toxic dumping by Europe and – mainly Europe, but probably
Saudi Arabia and others, which drives the fishermen out of the water.

But there’s a further background. During the so-called War on Terror, the
Treasury department found a charity – a big charity, which they claimed was
funding terrorists. So that was their big triumph. They closed down this
charity. I mean, they later conceded that they were wrong, they weren’t doing
anything, but it turned out that this charity they helped close down was
keeping Somalia alive. It was a major source of income for Somalia, and it
even was developing banks, and businesses, and so on. So when they pulled
the rug out from under them, that really shafted the economy, not much of an
economy to begin with, but when you pull out a big segment like that, it’s
harmful.

Kilkenny: Do you think it’s ever acceptable to use military intervention, and
how do you think the military should be used in the case of a situation like
genocide in Darfur or the Taliban’s takeover of the Swat valley [in Pakistan]?

Chomsky: First of all, those are different cases. Darfur – It’s a good question
why Darfur is such an issue. I mean, there’s a lot of killing in Darfur. The
numbers are apparently mostly made up, but it’s substantial. On the other
hand, it isn’t a fraction of the dead in Iraq, let’s say, and it isn’t even a tiny
fraction of the dead in the Congo right near by. So why is there a huge
campaign about Darfur, and not one about a hundred times as bad about the
Congo, and one a thousand times as bad about Iraq? Because we’re doing
them. It’s not for pretty reason, I think.

In Darfur, it’s presented as a morality play. Poor blacks being killed by bad
Arabs. There’s no such differences, but you’re supposed to hate Arabs, and it’s
sort of nice to be in favor of the blacks. There are “Save Darfur” committees all
over the place, but apparently not much funds – if anything – goes to Darfur.
So it’s become a huge morality play. Now, what are you going to do with
intervention?
In fact, one of the decent things the Bush administration did – there weren’t
many, but there were some – one of them was that it did help negotiate a
partial settlement of a major civil war, the north-south civil war. There were
other complexities in the western (inaudible) of Darfur, in Sudan. It’s very
complicated multiethnic problems, problems between nomads and farmers.
Desertification is driving the nomads off their land, and they had a kind of
organic interaction with the farming communities in the past, but it’s just
become extremely hostile.

(inaudible)

…It’s striking that the few people who know something about Sudan are
against military intervention like Alex de Wall or Mahmoud Mamdani, and
others. They actually have – probably because they know something about it.
(inaudible)

So military intervention: the answer is that they need political settlement, and
economic aid, and so on.

The Taliban in the Swat valley…again, it’s part of a much bigger issue. First of
all, what we call Taliban are probably – to a large extent – just the northwest
tribes. They’ve never accepted central government control. Ever. They have
never accepted the Durand Line, the line that separates Pakistan from
Afghanistan.
It cuts right through Pashtun territory. For them, it’s as if we – somebody
outside power separate Cambridge from Boston. (laughter) There are Taliban
there. Also, that’s just one of the uprisings that’s tearing Pakistan apart.
There’s a big revolt in Balochistan (southwest area of Pakistan) that’s been put
down very brutally.

There’s disturbances in Sindh (southeastern area of Pakistan), the Pashtun

(people of southeastern and northwestern Pakistan, constitute the majority of
Afghanistan) hate the Punjabi (people in the region straddling the border
between India and Pakistan)

The army’s mostly Punjabi. It’s a very difficult situation. Foreign invasion –
even if it’s conceivable, which it isn’t. I mean, there’s a reason why the US is
using drones. It’s an internal Pakistani problem, and it’s a much bigger one
than just Swat Valley.
There’s a segment [in Pakistan] that’s radical Islamists, but it’s a small
segment. It’s a pretty democratic country in many ways. When you have a
vote, the vote is against the radical Islamists. On the other hand, the people in
these areas – it’s a feudal society. A tiny percentage of the population has all
the wealth. There’s tremendous poverty there.

There’s no functioning society. There’s no security, there’s no health, there’s

no nothing. No agricultural support. When these so-called Taliban come in,
they are brutal, but at least they impose some kind of order, which apparently
for many people is better than nothing. That’s one reason the (inaudible) is
not sending the army after them. It’s using Special Forces and air force
probably because they just don’t trust the army (inaudible) there’d be
sympathy for [the Taliban].

And in fact, we have a big hand in that. That’s one of Reagan’s legacies. It’s
never been pretty in Pakistan. The US has supported military dictatorships all
along, but in the Reagan years it went out of control. Pakistan had a vicious
military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, who wanted to radically Islamize the country, so
money was pouring in from Saudi Arabia, which is a very extreme,
fundamentalist version of Islam, different than the softer Sufi kind they had in
Pakistan. They had madrasahs all over the country where kids are doing
nothing but studying Koran and becoming Islamic extremists, and Reagan was
pouring money in.

It was also Reagan – or whoever in his administration who was doing these
things – they were pretending Pakistan wasn’t developing nuclear weapons.
They knew perfectly well that they were, so that they could keep the flow of
funds from (inaudible) Congress. The purpose of it was to kill Russians. They
said so. The Russians were in Afghanistan; this was a great opportunity to kill
them. It wasn’t to help the Afghans. In fact, they armed them, but they were
killing plenty of Russians, so if Afghanistan and Pakistan go down the tube,
somebody else will worry about it.
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— Noam Chomsky

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"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."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: authority, challenge, dismantle, domination, freedom, heirarchy, human-

freedom, illegitimate-power, justification

38 people liked it

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"It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies."
— Noam Chomsky

38 people liked it

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"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

— Noam Chomsky

35 people liked it

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"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you
say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: truth

34 people liked it

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"Education is imposed ignorance."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: education, homeschooling, ignorance, public-education

30 people liked it

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"If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If
you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to
change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better
world."
— Noam Chomsky

29 people liked it

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"See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence."

— Noam Chomsky

tags: violence

26 people liked it

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"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that
the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for
making it so."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: future, optimism, responsibility

25 people liked it

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"In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are
more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: democracy-freedom

23 people liked it

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"That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the
conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should
be dismantled if that burden cannot be met."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: anarchism, anarchy, authority, politics

23 people liked it

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"Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a
problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge,
and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we
can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would
even look like."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: ignorance-mysteries-problems

22 people liked it

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"The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history."

— Noam Chomsky

tags: bible-genocide

21 people liked it

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"The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and
aliens, the more you control all of the people."
— Noam Chomsky

18 people liked it

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"Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a
key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light
is. It has no other choice."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: science

17 people liked it
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"That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that
nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what
it means, because it doesn't mean anything."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: books, politics

16 people liked it

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"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"
— Noam Chomsky

tags: art, human-condition

16 people liked it

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"Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate
growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I
think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight
percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is
to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and
the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if
children['s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds
of things in ways we don't understand."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: education

15 people liked it

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"If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed
progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn't
happen by laws of nature. And it doesn't happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a
result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems
honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at
them, with no guarantee of success — in fact, with a need for a rather high
tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments."
— Noam Chomsky
 12 people liked it

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"Bolivia is a striking example. The mostly white, Europeanized elite, which is a

minority, happens to be sitting on most of the hydrocarbon reserves. For the first
time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it's therefore bitterly hated by the West,
which despises democracy, because it's much too dangerous."
— Noam Chomsky

10 people liked it

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"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the
manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied.
Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."
— Noam Chomsky

10 people liked it

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"The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who
demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill."
— Noam Chomsky

9 people liked it

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"We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the
marching orders."
— Noam Chomsky (9-11)

9 people liked it

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"For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit. (p.73)"
— Noam Chomsky (Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World)

8 people liked it

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"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"
— Noam Chomsky

tags: art, human-condition

6 people liked it

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"The war against working people should be understood to be a real war….

Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business
class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except
they don’t want anybody else to know about it."
— Noam Chomsky

5 people liked it

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"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that
the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for
making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be
no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities
to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world.
The choice is yours."
— Noam Chomsky

5 people liked it

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"If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from
nontrivial principles, let's see it."
— Noam Chomsky (Propaganda and the Public Mind)

4 people liked it

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"As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise human
science is at a loss."
— Noam Chomsky

4 people liked it

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"Education is a condition of imposed ignorance!

"
— Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media)

4 people liked it

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"To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political
correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to
guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world."
— Noam Chomsky (World Orders, Old and New)

2 people liked it

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"Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of

communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of
disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine

participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will
be for the foreseeable future."
— Noam Chomsky

2 people liked it

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"Un sistema de adoctrinamiento que funcione como es debido debe cumplir

diversas tareas, algunas bastante delicadas. Uno de sus objetivos son las masas
estúpidas e ignorantes. Deberán ser mantenidas en ese estado, distraídas con
simplificaciones groseras y de gran fuerza emocional, marginadas y aisladas. En
una situación ideal, cada persona debería hallarse sola frente a la pantalla de su
televisor, viendo deportes, telenovelas o comedias, privada de estructuras
organizativas que permitan a los individuos carentes de recursos descubrir cuáles
son sus pensamientos y creencias en interacción con otras personas, formular sus
propias preocupaciones y planes y actuar para hacerlos realidad. Llegada esa
situación, se les puede permitir ratificar las decisiones tomadas por quienes son
mejores que ellos en elecciones celebradas periódicamente, y hasta animarles a
hacerlo. La "multitud canallesca" es el blanco apropiado de los medios de
comunicación y de un sistema de educación pública encaminado a generar
obediencia y formación en las destrezas requeridas, incluida la de repetir lemas
patrióticos en ocasiones oportunas.
El problema del adoctrinamiento es un tanto distinto para aquellos de quienes se
espera que participen en la toma de decisiones serias y en el ejercicio del control:
los gestores de las empresas, del Estado y de la cultura, y los sectores culturizados
en general. Estas personas deben interiorizar los valores del sistema y compartir las
ilusiones necesarias que permitan su funcionamiento en interés de quienes
concentran en sus manos el poder y los privilegios. Pero también han de tener
cierta comprensión de las realidades del mundo, pues de lo contrario no serán
capaces de realizar sus tareas con eficacia. Los medios elitistas y los sitemas
educativos deben encontrar la forma de resolver esos dilemas, lo cual constituye
una labor nada fácil. Es interesante ver en detalle cómo se lleva a cabo dicha labor,
pero se trata de algo que cae fuera de los límites de estas observaciones."
— Noam Chomsky (On Anarchism)

1 person liked it

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"Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant
impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing
effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these
are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism
of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The
same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed
people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United
States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These
are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: change, progressives

1 person liked it

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"I am not too happy with terms like “the left”, to be honest. And I don’t use it
much….if by “the left” you mean people who are committed to peace and justice
and freedom and so on, there can’t be elements of the left opposed to workers’
movement, at least under that definition."
— Noam Chomsky