14 Noam Chomsky Quotes on Human rights

Noam Chomsky quotes on human rights

18. The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries, who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

22. If there was anyone who actually fit the category of conservative, if there was such a category of people, they would have a very easy way to deal with the fact that 60% of the children under 2 [in Nicaragua] are suffering probable brain damage. Namely, by paying their debts. Simple conservative principle. But that's beyond unthinkable. Compassionate conservatives might want to go beyond that, if they existed. But they're much more interested in making political capital over the fact that a woman in a vegetative state shouldn't be allowed to die in dignity.

63. The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term 'globalization' to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become 'anti-globalist.' This is simply vulgar propaganda, like the term 'anti-Soviet' used by the most disgusting commissars to refer to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic. Take the World Social Forum, called 'anti-globalization' in the propaganda system -- which happens to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow highly privileged elites who meet at the competing World Economic Forum, and are called 'pro-globalization' by the propaganda system. An observer watching this farce from Mars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the educated classes.

64. In my view Columbia completely disgraced itself, as did the media and commentary generally... The morning of Ahmadenijad's speech at Columbia, the university welcomed the President of Turkmenistan for a speech at a world leaders conference; an outstanding democracy, with a stellar human rights record -- and, incidentally, plenty of natural gas that the US covets. As Ahmadinejad visited New York, Pakistani riot police were beating lawyers and other demonstrators protesting the dictator Musharraf's organization of his forthcoming election -- which might remind us of President Bollinger's effusive praise for the dictator in introducing him for a talk at Columbia. Of course Pakistan is not suspected of developing nuclear weapons. Rather, it developed them, while the Reagan administration politely looked the other way and pretended it did not know, and also harbors the leading nuclear proliferator, Abdul Qadeer Khan. And if we go farther back, we can recall the warm welcome Columbia gave to the Shah of Iran, right after the tyrant was installed in power by a US-UK military coup, overthrowing the parliamentary government. The Shah was presented with an honorary degree as he delivered the Gabriel Silver Lecture Dedicated to International Peace, in which he urged that 'We must be strong enough internally and externally so that the temptation of subversion from within, supported from without, can be obliterated.' Delightful timing... Since Ahmadinejad was not as offensive as was hoped, the press had to seize on his silly remark about homosexuality (see, e.g., the infantile New Yorker cover) -- deeply offensive to countries like ours and Britain that have been so supportive of gay rights since they gained independence centuries ago. For example when the British government forced the great mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing to undergo 'hormone therapy' to cure his disease, leading to his suicide. Just at about the time that the US-UK were installing the Shah and Columbia was inviting him to present deep thoughts on the dangers of 'subversion from within, supported from without.' It was a pathetic display.

85. The most important victory, in fact, was in Indonesia. In 1965 there was a military coup, which instantly carried out a Rwanda-style slaughter, and it's not an exaggeration. Rwanda-style slaughter, which wiped out the only mass-based political organization, killed mostly landless peasants, and instituted a brutal and murderous regime. There was total euphoria in the United States. So happy, they couldn't contain it. When you read the press, it was just ecstatic. It's kind of suppressed now because it doesn't look pretty in retrospect, but it was understood. Years later, McGeorge Bundy, who was the national security advisor, recognized that, he said, and I think he's right, the U.S. should have stopped the war in Vietnam in 1965, because we basically won. By 1965 South Vietnam was largely destroyed, most of the rest was gonna quickly be destroyed, and we had saved the major prize, Indonesia. The rot wasn't gonna spread to Indonesia after this delightful Rwanda-style slaughter.

99. The Americans didn't even think about the outcome of the bombing, because the Sudanese were so far below contempt as to be not worth thinking about. Suppose I walk down the sidewalk in Cambridge and, without a second thought, step on an ant. That would mean that I regard the ant as beneath contempt, and that's morally worse than if I purposely killed that ant.

117. I think murdering Iraqi union leaders is criminal, for example. And a lot of what the insurgents have done is criminal. But, you know, you rank the priorities. Our priority is to stop major war crimes, like Fallujah for example. So yeah, what the resistance is doing, one can also criticize, harshly in fact. But in any kind of ranking, even if we're on Mars, and certainly if we're in the United States, what vastly more important is our own crimes, which are much worse, and they're ours.

139. There are significant strategic interests [in Oceania], and there's a lot of stuff going on that's important. Not just the United States. For example, France is doing some really vicious things there, in fact they're just wiping out islands because they want them for nuclear tests. And when the socialist government in France is asked, 'Why to do this?', they say, 'Well look, we have to have nuclear tests.' Well, if you have to have nuclear tests, why not have them in southern France? [audience laughter] Why have them in some island in the Pacific? Well, the answer to that is clear, after all they're just a bunch of little brown people or something. But you can't say that exactly, especially if you're a socialist, so something else is said.

146. [Q: do you think the Palestinian suicide bombers are freedom fighters or terrorists?] They're terrorists - they're both, actually. They're trying to fight for freedom, but doing it in a totally unacceptable immoral way. Of course they're terrorists. And there's been Palestinian terrorism all the way through. I have always opposed it, I oppose it now. But it's very small as compared with the US-backed Israeli terrorism. Quite typically, violence reflects the means of violence. It's not unusual. State terror is almost always much more extreme than retail terror, and this is no exception.

149. The whole question of recognizing the right of a state to exist was invented solely for Israel. People, on the other hand, have a right to exist. So the people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace.

162. ...I think the basic question you ask is a good one: if we were to withdraw our own beating people over the heads with clubs, would it necessarily follow that somebody else would take that role, or are there other alternatives? Well yeah, there are other alternatives. For example, the alternatives that are favored by the overwhelming majority of the population of the United States. I mentioned one piece of it: let the UN function. The UN isn't perfect, a lot of things wrong with it, just like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn't perfect... But one step would be to pay some respect to the 'decent opinion of mankind', to quote the famous author, and let international institutions function so as to reduce the likelihood that anybody will use force...

219. ...the problem lies in Chomsky's description of Serb atrocities as 'quite real' and 'often ghastly'. 'Quite real ' is a cop-out for very real. Atrocities 'sharply escalated' after Nato's bombardment, he says, but does not explain what these were: mass executions, rape, torture. The index refers to 'atrocities' in Africa, Columbia, East Timor and Turkey without the appearance of 'Serbia'. --Robert Fisk, December 15, 1999 [200]

241. I'm not a pacifist. And I am not one of those people, like Noam Chomsky, with whom I have agreed on some points, I don't agree on this point, who believes that all uses of American imperial power are by definition wrong. I suppose in fact I might be called, in a certain stretch, a liberal imperialist. I believe there are times when great powers can intervene to prevent atrocities, and should. --Susan Sontag, March 2, 2003 [222]

248. Western liberalism has a tendency to change the subject when confronted with the true nature of regimes opposed by the US, even to give them the benefit of the doubt: look at Noam Chomsky's effective support for the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. It is a form of intellectual decadence that won't look good on the historical record. --Colin Donald, April 15, 2006 [229]