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The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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Media Critic
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
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The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.
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We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
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You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
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Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.
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Anything that you are achieving that undermines and threatens systems of power will meet with oppression. Systems of power don't say 'thank you.' What's important is not to focus all your efforts on the oppression, but to continue the constructive work.
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You know, people talk about [Richard] Nixon's madman theory. We don't really know much about that. It was in memoirs, by somebody else.
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Control is the source of strategic power.
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In the Munich agreement in late 1938 [Franklin] Roosevelt sent his chief adviser Sumner Welles, who came back with a very supportive statement saying that Hitler was someone we could really do business with and so on.
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I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.
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Any incident could instantly blow up. Both sides [USA and Russia] are modernizing and increasing their military systems, including nuclear systems.
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There is kind of a fundamental conformity, which is a virtual requirement to enter into the media.
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Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.
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Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.
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Anyone in a position to overcome barriers to free thought and communication should do so.
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If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.
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The Republican establishment, the mainstream corporate financial wealth, is getting to a point where it can't control the base it's mobilized.
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One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters
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Greece, alone, is in a very vulnerable position. If the Greeks had had support from progressive left and popular forces elsewhere in Europe they might have been able to resist the demands of the Troika, but they had almost no support. Not even from Portugal, Spain, or other left forces. They were left alone.
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In the case of [Antonio] Gramsci, the Fascist government agreed that he was a model intellectual in [Edward] Said's sense, and for that reason determined, in their words, that we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.
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What can realistically be done depends on the historical moment. The same is true with regard to the agents.
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