Noam Chomsky Quotes.
Chinese military spending is carefully monitored by the United States.
Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‘What is the scientific status of the claims?’ ‘What social or ideological needs do they serve?’
Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use – a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.
The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.
What’s important in Libya is, first of all, it has a good deal of oil. A lot of the country is unexplored; there may be a lot more. And it’s very high-quality oil, so very valuable.
Today, we have private airline companies, but if you take a look at a Boeing plane next time you travel, you’ll see that you are basically taking a ride on a modified bomber.
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination’, we might say – exercised through the mass media.
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 workers are more insecure, that’s very ‘healthy’ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health.
It is easy to dismiss the world as ‘irrelevant,’ or consumed by ‘paranoid anti-Americanism,’ but perhaps not wise.
Governments don’t control people like they used to.
The best defense against democracy is to distract people.
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.
Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.
In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.
There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.
