Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.
Noam ChomskyColombia was a big wheat producer in the 1950's. That was eliminated by what sounds like a nice plan, called "Food for Peace. " It's a plan by which US taxpayers subsidized US agribusiness to send food to poor countries. This, of course, destroyed the domestic agricultural markets of these countries, opening these markets to US agribusiness.
Noam ChomskyThe Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.
Noam ChomskyHistory records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones; it also records painful reversals and setbacks.
Noam ChomskyAnd if you look at all this academic work in the conferences and so on there's a constant theme that terrorism is extremely hard to define and we therefore have to have a deep thinking about it. And the reason it's hard to define is quite simple. It's hard to find a definition that includes what they do to us but excludes what we do to them. That's quite difficult. So it takes a global war on terrorism.
Noam Chomsky