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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.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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Suppose that, say, China established military bases in Colombia to carry out chemical warfare in Kentucky and North Carolina to destroy this lethal crop [tobacco] that is killing huge numbers of Chinese.
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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.
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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.
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The Obama administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism. In fact, he is doing it all over the world. Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns - which are just part of the special forces operations and so on - all of these operations are terror operations.
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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.
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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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A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.
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If a person chooses not to be a writer, or speaker, then (by definition) the person is choosing not to be engaged in an effort,to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them, apart, perhaps, from some circle of immediate associates.
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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.
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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.
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Edward Said is a very honorable representative of the intellectual in the sense of the term that he defines.
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The United States is a very insular society. Most people know very little about the outside world and don't care that much. They're concerned with their own affairs.
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I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.
Noam Chomsky
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John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
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Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.
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The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.
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There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.
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The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.
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Yes, and Syrians. There is a horrible crisis there and the United States has admitted virtually none of the refugees.
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Take Germany and Japan, both defeated in the Second World War. Germany has acknowledged its monstrous crimes to a certain extent, has paid reparations and so on. Japan, in contrast, apologizes for nothing and has paid no reparations, with one exception: It pays reparations to the United States, but not to Asia.
Noam Chomsky