The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.
Governments don't control people like they used to.
If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.
Why should Iran have a deterrent strategy? Well, it's surrounded by hostile enemies. Both of its borders have been under occupation by a hostile superpower, the United States, which is constantly violating the U.N. charter by leaving open what they call the saying, 'all options are open' - meaning the threat of war.
I mean, it's nice to have the laws, but it's nice partly because it makes it easier to struggle for your rights-it's not that the laws give you the rights. Laws can be on the books and mean absolutely nothing.
The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
If a concept or principle finds its place in an explanatory theory, it cannot be excluded on methodological grounds.
The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.
And the spectators must not be allowed to see too much. President Obama has set new standards in safeguarding this principle. He has, in fact, punished more whistle-blowers than all previous presidents combined, a real achievement for an administration that came to office promising transparency.
Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place.
The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.
I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.
He did not foresee that in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical environment—I speak optimistically.
I like Gramsci. He's an important person.
There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11.
Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.
We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
In this case, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's orders were being carried out—anything that flies on anything that moves, an open call for genocide that is rare in the historical record.
In the U.S. Constitution there was a category of creatures called three-fifth humans—the enslaved population. They weren't considered persons. And in fact women were barely considered persons, so they didn't have rights.
The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.
The doctrine that everything is fine as long as the population is quiet, that applies in the Middle East, applies in Central America, it applies in the United States.
The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.
Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.
Syntactic Structures and LSLT.
The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you're not teaching it is unique in the industrial world. And the statistics are mind-boggling. Roughly half the population think the world was created a couple thousand years ago.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the U.N. vetoed several resolutions right away, calling for an end to the fighting and so on, and that was a hideous invasion.
There's plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting, productive workaround for people to do, and there are plenty of people who want to do it―they simply aren't being allowed that opportunity under the current economic system.
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.
The choice is ours, the choice is yours.
I didn't pay my taxes for years.
Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.
The rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization, because organization just causes trouble. People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action.
The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.
No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don't coalesce into a movement that can really do things.
Immediately after 11 September, the U.S. closed down the Somali charitable network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the 'war on terror.' In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without merit a year later aroused little notice.
Willingness to be puzzled by what seem to be obvious truths is the first step towards gaining understanding of how the world works.
A sit-down strike is just one step short of saying, Look, instead of sitting down, we'll run this place. We don't need owners and managers. That's huge. That could be done in Detroit and in other places that are being closed down.
In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.
U.S. analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness.
Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use - a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.
I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.
The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone. It was not an easy task. There was no good text available.
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.
The advertising industry's prime task is to ensure that uninformed consumers make irrational choices, thus undermining market theories that are based on just the opposite.
I do not pretend to know the answer to this question. But it seems clear that unless there is, in some form, a positive answer, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are not great.
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the '90s.
