Noam Chomsky

Latin America has, to a significant extent, liberated itself from foreign-meaning mostly U.S.-domination in the past 10 or 15 years. That’s a dramatic development in world affairs. It’s the first time in 500 years. It’s a big change.

So the fear of drugs and the fear of crime is very much stimulated by state and business propaganda. The National Justice Commission repeatedly points out that crime in the United States, while sort of high, is not off the spectrum for industrialized societies.

China’s refusal to accept opium from Britain’s Indian colony was denounced by John Quincy Adams as a violation of the Christian principle of ‘love thy neighbor’ and ‘an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations’.

The political and social history of Western democracies records all sorts of efforts to ensure that the formal mechanisms are little more than wheels spinning idly. The goal is to eliminate public meddling in policy formation.

Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren’t human. They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them.

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.

I think when you see an aircraft fire, these angry, black puffs of smoke, knowing that one of them could kill you that you – you – you understand the seriousness of the mission. And you understand your own mortality.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.

U.S. and Canada were completely isolated from the rest of the hemisphere on two issues. One was admission of Cuba into hemispheric systems. The second was the drug war, which Latin America are essentially the victims of the drug war.

If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.

No one can match America. We have big hearts-and the courage to do what’s right. But we’re not the world’s policemen. And if we have to take on that role, we need to send a clear message that protection comes at a price. If other countries benefit from our armed forces protecting them, those countries should cover the costs. Period.

I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state – a new idea, this – even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

I believe there’s too little patience and context to many of the investigations I read or see on television.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

While maintaining our nuclear potential at the proper level, we need to devote more attention to developing the entire range of means of information warfare.

What happened to the confidence and ideals of the European dream? The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.

Do you remember the tsar? Well, I‘m like a tsar.

Protest actions and propaganda are two slightly different things.

Libya is divided into tribes and clans.