Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomskyis an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 December 1928
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.
By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.
I have never really thought that the Left was much in 'array' as far as political purposes were concerned.
In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.
I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn't picked me up.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.
In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.
In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers, but not against the United States.
In the case of the environment, there's no one to bail it out.
In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.
Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set it.
If you want to achieve something, you build the basis for it.
In a democracy, in a functioning democracy, what would be happening is that popular organizations, unions, political groupings, others would be developing their programs, putting them forth, insisting that their representatives implement those programs.
In Egypt, on the eve of Tahrir Square, there was a major poll which found that overwhelmingly - 80-90%, numbers like that - Egyptians regarded the main threats they face as the U.S. and Israel. They don't like Iran - Arabs generally don't like Iran - but they didn't consider it a threat.