Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

So there was a stand-off between them early in November—which even included an actual confrontation between Russian and Cuban forces about who was going to have physical control of the missiles. It was a very tense moment, and you didn’t know what was going to happen. Then right in the middle of it, one of the Operation MONGOOSE activities took pla

What you see is big corporations selling relatively privileged audiences in the decision-making classes to other businesses. Now you ask, what picture of the world do you expect to come out of this arrangement? Well, a plausible answer is, one that puts forward points of view and political perspectives which satisfy the needs and the interests and

And there was a general consensus among elites, it wasn’t just Reagan, that you had to break down the welfare state in order to maintain the profitability and competitiveness of American capital.

And sometime in the Seventies, the American army shifted to a traditional mercenary army of the poor, which they call a “volunteer army.” People in power learn, you know. They’re sophisticated, and they’re organized, and they have continuity—and they realize that they made a mistake in Vietnam. They don’t want to make that same mistake again.

the meat of the matter. Is the “Propaganda Model” descriptively accurate? Is it true that the media serve the “traditional Jeffersonian role,” or do they rather follow the “Propaganda Model”?

But of course, there’s a background, as there always is to everything, and part of the background is that the United States was planning to invade Cuba at the time, and the Russians knew it, and the Cubans knew it. The Americans didn’t know it—I mean, the American people didn’t know it. In fact, even a lot of the American government didn’t know it;

That was Walter Lippmann’s point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists—he referred to the population as a “bewildered herd”: we have to protect ourselves from “the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd.” And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”—if you don’t do i

Operation MONGOOSE. Right after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt failed, Kennedy launched a major terrorist operation against Cuba [beginning November 30, 1961]. It was huge—I think it had a $50 million-a-year budget (that’s known);

there really are conflicting values in these systems, and those conflicts allow for possibilities. One value is service to power; another value is professional integrity—and journalists can’t do their job of serving power effectively unless they know how to work with some integrity, but if they know how to work with some integrity, they’re also goi

In fact, the nature of Western systems of indoctrination is typically not understood by dictators, they don’t understand the utility for propaganda purposes of having “critical debate” that incorporates the basic assumptions of the official doctrines, and thereby marginalizes and eliminates authentic and rational critical discussion.