Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

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.

the United States had invasion plans for October 1962; the Missile Crisis was in October 1962. In fact, American naval and military units were already being deployed for an invasion before the beginning of the Missile Crisis;

So in that little comment Gaddis was getting near the main story: he was saying, post-war American decisions on rearmament and détente have been keyed to domestic economic considerations—but then he drops it, and we go back to talking about “containment” again.

In fact, there was a military commission that reviewed My Lai, the Piers Commission, and their most dramatic finding was that there were massacres like My Lai all over the place. For instance, they found another massacre in My Khe, which is about four kilometers down the road—everywhere they looked they found another massacre.81 Well, what does tha

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.

I think the scale of clandestine government activities is a pretty good measure of the popular dissidence and activism in a country—and clandestine activities shot way up during the Reagan period. That tells you something right there about popular “empowerment”: it’s a reflection of people’s power that the government was forced underground. That’s

The only poll that I’ve seen about journalists is that they are basically narcissistic and left of center. Look, what people call “left of center” doesn’t mean anything—it means they’re conventional liberals, and conventional liberals are very state-oriented, and usually dedicated to private power.

for the agenda-setting media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they’re in fact selling very privileged, elite audiences to other businesses—overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called “political class,” which is the class that makes decisions in our society.

In fact, there was more funding of Guatemala under Carter than there was under Reagan, though it’s not very well known. See, the Carter administration was compelled to stop sending military aid to Guatemala by Congressional legislation in 1977, and officially they did—but if you look at the Pentagon records, funding continued until around 1980 or ’