Noam Chomsky

selected quotes

..." suppose I'm talking about international terrorism, and I say that we ought to stop it in Washington, which is a major center of it. People back off, "What do you mean, Washington's a major center of it?" Then you have to explain. You have togive some background. That's exactly what Jeff Greenfield is talking about. You don't want people who have to give background, because that would allow critical thought. What you want is completely conformist ideas. You want just repetition of the propaganda line, the party line. For that you need "concision". I could do it too. I could say what I think in three sentences, too. But it would just sound as if it was off the wall, because there's no basis laid for it. If you come from the American Enterprise Institute and you say it in three sentences, yes, people hear it every day, so what's the big deal? Yeah, sure, Qaddafi's the biggest monster in the world, and the Russians are conquering theworld, and this and that, Noriega's the worst gangster since so-and-so. For that kind of thing you don't need any background. You just rehash the thoughts that everybody's always expressed and that you hear from Dan Rather and everyone else. That's a structural technique that's very valuable. In fact, if people like Ted Koppel were smarter, they would allow more dissidents on, because they would just make fools of themselves. Either you would sell out and repeat what everybody else is saying because it's the only way to sound sane, or else you would say what you think, in which case you'd sound like a madman, even if what you think is absolutely true and easily supportable. The reason is that the whole system so completely excludes it. It'll sound crazy, rightly, from their point of view. And since you have to have concision, as Jeff Greenfield says, you don't have time toexplain it. That's a marvelous structural technique of propaganda...."

..." since the 1820s Cuba has been regarded by US elitesas basically theirs, though they couldn't grasp the "ripe fruit"(as they put it then) until the British deterrent was removed. When it was, the US took the country over and turned it into a US plantation. No departure from obedience was tolerable. FDR's "good neighbor policy," for example, was shelved rapidly when it became necessary to reverse a deviation that threatened to allow some degree of independence and democracy. Within months of the success of the Castro revolution, Cuba was being bombed from US territory, and by March 1960 the US had secretly determined to overthrow the regime. This had nothing to do withRussia, Communism, dictatorship,... -- rather, with independence. There followed direct aggression, a huge terror campaign of unprecedented scale, economic warfare, and in fact,every possible means to get rid of this "rotten apple." Cuba was considered particularly dangerous because it sank so low as to direct resources to the benefit of the poor majority and, even worse, to support popular movements elsewhere that sought freedom from US-imposed or -backed monsters of one or another variety (what is called "subversion" or "aggression"). Another major crime was Cuba's contributions to health and welfare in poor and suffering countries, absolutely without precedent, andconsidered extremely dangerous, particularly in the light of the sordid record of those who have the wealth to confront and overcome those problems were they not to choose to exacerbate them -- us, in particular.For decades, the pretext for the terror and economic warfare was that Cuba was an outpost of the evil empire, threatening our security. When the evil empire collapsed, that excuse was quickly shelved, as useless, and forgotten, and the noose was tightened, again by the Bush administration (under pressure from liberal Democrats and the Clinton campaign), now again. These policies have long been in defiance of such trivialities as international law, world opinion (votes in the UN, including our allies), etc. In brief, a continuation of what has been going on for 170 years, and a particularly clear instance of far more general patterns, invisible only to those who make a real effort not to see..."