As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl.
Noam ChomskyEvery time a candidate came up from the base, that is with popular support, the Republican establishment went into high gear to destroy them with massive propaganda attack ads and so on. It was one after another, each one crazier than the last.
Noam ChomskyWhat was the invasion of South Vietnam, for example, in 1962, when Kennedy sent the Air Force to bomb South Vietnam and start chemical warfare? That's aggression.
Noam ChomskySocial and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.
Noam ChomskyColombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the '90s.
Noam ChomskyThere is a reason why Nelson Mandela went to Cuba to praise Castro and thank the Cuban people almost as soon as he got out of jail. That's a third world reaction and they understand it. Cuba played an enormous role in the liberation of Africa and the overthrow of Apartheid, sending doctors and teachers to the poorest places in the world, to Haiti, to Pakistan after the earthquake, almost everywhere. The internationalism is just astonishing. I don't think there has been anything like it in history.
Noam Chomsky