Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky

image As has become tradition here at Press Action, we celebrate and honor the life of Noam Chomsky instead of Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor 64 years ago today that catapulted the United States into one of the wickedest periods in human history.

Happy 77th birthday, Noam! And thanks for all your hard work during the past 40-plus years in deciphering and explaining U.S. government policy. Here are some nuggets of Chomskyian wisdom:

“The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can’t prove it, then it should be dismantled. ... There’s a very heavy burden of proof to be borne by anyone who calls for violence. Maybe it can be sometimes justified. Personally, I’m not a committed pacifist, so I think that, yes, it can sometimes be justified.”
— UC Berkeley Institute of International Studies interview, March 2002

“Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. ... I should add, however, that I find myself in substantial agreement with people who consider themselves anarcho-capitalists on a whole range of issues; and for some years, was able to write only in their journals. And I also admire their commitment to rationality — which is rare — though I do not think they see the consequences of the doctrines they espouse, or their profound moral failings.”
— Z Net, “Answers from Chomsky to eight questions on anarchism,” 1996

“Grotesque as the Soviet empire was, its very existence offered a certain space for non-alignment, and for perfectly cynical reasons, it sometimes provided assistance to victims of Western attack. Those options are gone, and the South is suffering the consequences.”
— Red & Black Revolution interview with Kevin Doyle, May 1995

“In the Spanish Civil War, there was a popular revolution, and the Stalin-backed Republic, and the Fascists, first combined, along with the Western democracies, to destroy the popular revolution, and after that was done, they fought to pick up the spoils. Which is not an unusual pattern.
— BBC interview with John Pilger, November 1992

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