Noam Chomsky

In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did.

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

But Klaus Barbie was basically small potatoes. Operation Paper Clip was a big operation, involving many top Nazis. We managed to get Walter Rauff, the guy who created the gas chambers, off to Chile. Others went to fascist Spain.

Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

So the growth of corporate propaganda in the United States more or less parallels the growth of democracy, for quite straightforward reasons. It’s not any kind of secret. It is discussed very frankly and openly in business literature and academic social-science journals.

The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.

If you look at Saddam Hussein, he killed terrorists. I’m not saying he was an angel, but this guy killed terrorists.

One of they key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace. Good people don’t go into government.

The only way we could get what most of the population wants with regard to health care is either by a large-scale popular movement, which would mean moving towards democracy and nobody in power is going to want that, or else if the business community decides that it’s good for them.

[living at the White House] This isn’t about us. There’s so much history here that no one family can claim this space as their own.

Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.

I’m one of those that believes you can’t be one kind of a man and another kind of president.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

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.

By now, about seventy percent of the population is literally disenfranchised. They’re the lower seventy percent on the income/wealth scale. Their political representatives simply pay no attention to them, so it doesn’t matter what they think.

It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody’s permission or to obey anybody’s orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.

I hope that things will not come to provocations (during the soccer World Cup). If this happens I think it would have very serious consequences for the Ukrainian government in general.

In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.

Politics should not interfere with sports. And sports should impact politics.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.