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There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Human Rights Activist
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Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
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There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic - solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups - sectors of these movements do very valuable work.
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Insofar as the universities are free and independent, they will also be subversive, in the sense that dominant structures of power and their ideological support will be subjected to challenge and critique, a counterpart to attitudes that are fostered in the hard sciences wherever they are taken seriously.
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That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.
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The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.
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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.
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Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
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Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think that that was what they were doing - nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils.
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Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.
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I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.
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[Companies that specialized in how to destroy unions] don't make it a secret, and they have all sorts of techniques for management to destroy unions.
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If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.
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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.
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[Internet] is kind of like a hammer. The technology itself doesn't determine how its used. It depends on the social, cultural and economic context in which the technology is made available.
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Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.
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If scientists and scholars were to become collectively self-organised and consciously activist today, they would probably devote themselves to service to state and private power. Those who have different goals should (and do) become organized and activist.
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Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way. It followed international law and treaty obligations. It collected evidence, brought the evidence to the highest existing tribunal, the International Court of Justice, and received a verdict - which, of course, the U.S. dismissed with contempt.
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The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening.
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If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.
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I can understand the idea that there is a conspiracy. In fact, 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. They [CIA] created a monster and now they are appalled by it.
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