Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

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.

it’s only natural that powerful interests wouldn’t want to support genuinely alternative structures—why would an institution function in such a way as to undermine itself? Of course that’s not going to happen.

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.

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

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

there were other events that took place in the midst of all of the furor over the K.A.L. flight—for example, the Times devoted one hundred words and no comment to the following fact: U.N.I.T.A., who are the so-called “freedom fighters” supported by the United States and South Africa in Angola, took credit for downing an Angolan civilian jet plane w

is that to a large extent the United States had to carry out its foreign interventions through the medium of mercenary states. There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states. Israel is the major one, but it also includes Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, the states that are involved in the World Anti-Communist League and the various military gro

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

So for Vann, the thinking was, these stupid Vietnamese peasants are making a mistake—it’s us smart guys who are the ones who can run the social revolution for them. They think the N.L.F. can run it, these people running around villages organizing them, but we’re really the only ones who can run it. And out of our duty to the poor people of the worl