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Given their unusual privilege, Western intellectuals can realistically accomplish a great deal. The limits are imposed by will more than objective circumstances. And about human will predictions are without value.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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East Oak Lane
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There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
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In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.
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Isaiah Berlin described the intellectuals of [Mikhail] Bakunin's Red bureaucracy as a secular priesthood.
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Look, the United States doesn't have political parties. In other countries, take say Europe, you can be an active member of the political party. Here, the only thing in a political party is gearing to elections, not the other things you do. So it's basically, a way of making people passive, submissive objects.
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The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire...
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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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The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.
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In some ways, [the student anti-sweatshop movement] is like the anti-apartheid movement, except that in this case its striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.
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Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.
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I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology.
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In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it's low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift - a striking shift - from production to financialization.
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No one is concerned with Central America anymore. If a million people are facing starvation in northern Nicaragua and Honduras, it's none of our business. Few people even recognize that this situation is in part an outgrowth of US policies going back to the 1980's. Nobody is concerned because Nicaragua is technically stable.
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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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When I wrote about the Spanish Civil War many years later, I used documents that I picked up when I was a child, as a lot hadn't been published (a lot more resources are available now).
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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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Organization and education, when they interact with each other, they strengthen each other, they are mutually supportive.
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[Barack] Obama was reaching a point [with Syria bombing] where he might not have been able to carry it off.He was losing support internally, and was compelled to send the vote to Congress, and it looked as if he was going to be defeated, which would have been a very serious blow to his presidency, to his authority.
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Women didn't have rights. Under British common law, women were property.
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There have been repeated cases when nuclear war came ominously close, often a result of malfunctioning of early-warning systems and other accidents, sometimes [as a result of] highly adventurist acts of political leaders.
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Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.
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