Christopher Hitchens Vs. Noam Chomsky on Osama Bin Laden
Hitchens Photo: Trockennasenaffe (CC) / Chomsky Photo: Duncan Rawlinson (CC)
Christopher Hitchens takes issue with Noam Chomsky’s recent Guernica article in Slate:
Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism.
This cognitive dissonance — to give it a polite designation — does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida’s martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the “operation.” As far as I know, only leading British “Truther” David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the…
Noam Chomsky: Is The World Too Big To Fail?
In a talk given in Amsterdam, Noam Chomsky weighs in on revolutionary unrest in the Middle East and the United States’ unsustainable foreign policy and domestic power structure. Via the Huffington Post:
Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.
Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry. After his 2008 victory, Obama won an award from the industry for the best marketing campaign of the year. Executives were euphoric. In the business press they explained that they had been marketing candidates like other commodities since Ronald Reagan, but 2008 was their greatest achievement and would change the style in corporate boardrooms. The 2012 election is expected to cost $2…
‘Democracy’, ‘Extremism’, ‘Stability’: Decoding The Code Words In News Media
Terms such as “stability”, “democracy”, and “religious extremism” in political discourse are generally used in a way that is different or opposite to their generally understood meaning.
Metadeniz presents a quick, amusing, and insightful primer on what Noam Chomsky calls “words with a technical meaning.” Including:
Promoting Democracy verb installing a government friendly to our interests in another country.
Freedom Fighters noun a proxy terrorist army that we support
National Interest noun the interests of the ultra-rich, particularly those in the U.S.A.
Stability noun (used referring to other countries) subordination to US power interests -> Usually achieved through war against the population.
Example: “We should promote democracy by supporting the freedom fighters in Nicaragua because it is in America’s national interest to promote stability in Central America.”
Translation: “We should send weapons to a proxy terrorist army that murders civilians to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, for the benefit of U.S investors and to intimidate other countries into doing what we say.”
Noam Chomsky On WikiLeaks, Middle East Uprisings And More
Thanks to Wiley for sending along this video of Noam Chomsky speaking at the University of Tennessee on January 25, 2011, which as Wiley points out was “the night of the State of the Union — he sort of gave his own version.”
Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal A ‘Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership’
Via Democracy Now!:
Full interview transcript at Democracy Now!
Robert Trivers Discusses Deception With Noam Chomsky
Some may find Chomsky talking about deception a tad ironic (see this post), but Trivers’s ideas about the evolution of self-deception are particularly interesting.
Noam Chomsky Admits There’s No Evidence Al-Qaeda Carried Out 9/11
From PressTV:
Renowned scholar Noam Chomsky says US invasion of Afghanistan was illegal since to date there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has carried out the 9/11 attacks.
“The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any,” the 81-year-old senior academic made the remarks on Press TV’s program A Simple Question.
“We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any.”
The political analyst also said that nonexistence of such evidence was confirmed by FBI eight months later.
“The head of FBI, after the most intense international investigation in history, informed the press that the FBI believed that the plot may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but was probably…
Why The New World Order Will Fail
This YouTube video features the voices of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Noam Chomsky, with this description:
The New World Order is a catch-all phrase that is used by fear mongering propagandists to captivate people with dread. Too many people for too long have been put under a spell with feelings of hopelessness and despair by this fairy tale concept that there is a secret society or race of reptiles out there to get them and their children, and that they are succeeding at doing it. Please show this video to anyone you can to help break the spell of fear placed over those who wish to make this world a better place.
Noam Chomsky, Libertarians, Intentional Communities, and the Venus Project
In searching for YouTube videos of Noam Chomsky debating libertarians such as Ron Paul or Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard, I found this:
Chomsky argues in this video that “if you go back to the Constitutional debates, they are all very clear: Madison, the framer of the Constitution, makes clear that the prime responsibility of government is to protect the minority, the opulent, against the majority.”
“Madison warned of what he called ‘the danger of the leveling spirit among the growing number of people who labor under all the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings’.” Chomsky thus argued that the primary principle of our Constitution was that “democracy is unacceptable.”…
Planet Chomsky vs. Dershowitz’s Orbit
By Gilad Atzmon:
The Israeli Interior Ministry on Sunday denied entry to Jewish American linguist Prof. Noam Chomsky turning him back from the Allenby Bridge border crossing in the Jordan Valley. Seemingly, the moral ash cloud that is pouring out of the morbid Jewish ghetto known as Israel is not going to clear. It is there to stay.
On the face of it, Chomsky’s border incident shouldn’t take us by surprise. Israel is the Jewish state and as such it operates as a synagogue of great magnitude…
Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once
Photo: Stevertigo (CC)
From the Onion. Yeah, that Onion, so progressives please try to remember where you left your sense of humor:
LEXINGTON, MA — Describing himself as “terribly exhausted,” famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said Monday that he was taking a break from combating the hegemony of the American imperialist machine to try and take it easy for once.
“I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning,” said the outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic, who first came to public attention with his breakthrough 1957 book Syntactic Structures. “The systems of control designed to manufacture consent among a largely ignorant public will still be there for me to worry about tomorrow. Today, I’m just going to kick back and enjoy some much-needed Noam Time.”
“No fighting against institutional racism, no exposing the legacies of colonialist ideologies still persistent today, no standing up to the widespread dissemination of misinformation and…
Mark Abell Grills Noam Chomsky On 911 As An Inside Job
Mark Abell Grills Noam Chomsky on 911 as an Inside Job. If the Reichstag Fire was an inside job and Pearl Harbor was an inside job, why then is it inconceivable that 911 was an inside job?
Chomsky says U.S. leaders would have to be certifiably insane in order to commit 911 as an inside job…
