12 Noam Chomsky Quotes on Military

Noam Chomsky quotes on military

45. We have a big argument here about whether Nicaragua and Cuba are sending arms to El Salvador. Well, I don't know, so far there's no evidence that they are, but that's not really the interesting question. I mean, you gotta watch the way questions are framed by the propaganda system. The way it's framed is, the doves say they're not sending arms, and the hawks say they are sending arms. But the real question, which is being suppressed in all of this, is, 'Should they be sending arms?' And the answer is of course, 'Yes.' [applause] Everybody should be sending arms. You see, that question is not raised. Just as if, somebody was talking in, say, the Soviet Union, and the question came up, 'Should somebody send arms to Afghan rebels?' Well, of course not, you know, that's terrorism or something like that. The point is that it's perfectly legitimate to send arms to people who finally try to use violence in self-defense against a gang of mass murderers installed by a foreign power. Of course it's legitimate to send them arms.

46. On September 1st of last year, the Soviet Union shot down Korean KAL 007, killing 269 people, and the immediate response here was that this proves that the Russians are the most barbaric people since Attila the Hun or something, and therefore we have to step up the attack against Nicaragua, set in MX missiles, put Pershings in West Germany, and increase the military system. In fact, the immediate main reaction here was great euphoria on Wall Street, where commentators pointed out that defense stocks have never looked better, you know, the big rise in defense stocks. All of this was because of this barbarous act, which is the worst thing that ever happened in human history. The story was given unbelievable coverage. Not only the story, but the American government interpretation of it, which is roughly what I've just said, was given the kind of coverage that I doubt has ever been given to any story in history... Just to give you an indication, the New York Times publishes an index volume, very densely printed thing, you practically need a magnifying glass to read it, big pages... For the month of September alone, the index volume is 7 pages, just on this... And it's all from the standpoint of the government, namely, here're these unbelievable monsters, for no reason other than sadistic love of massacre, killed 269 innocent people. Well, the government story gradually eroded and collapsed, and now basically nothing's left of it, except some funny questions. Like, what was that Korean airliner actually doing over the most sensitive area of Russian airspace? And why didn't the American reconnaissance jets nearby, RC-135 or... Why didn't they signal to the plane, as they certainly had the ability to do, to get out of the region? And what was it doing there in the first place, how come it was on a great circle route? It's very hard to imagine by a navigational error. There're all kinds of questions like that, and those questions have essentially collapsed the government case, as was sort of quietly admitted in the small print after the political capital has been made. But there're some other things, which are never discussed, which I think are even more important. So let me mention a couple. Right in the middle of all of this furor about the Korean airliner, on November 11th in fact, there was a 100 word item in the New York Times, devoted to the interesting fact that UNITA, which is a group that we call 'freedom fighters', supported by us and South Africa, in Angola, they took credit for shooting down a civilian Angolan jet, killing 126 people. Now, there was no RC-135 in the area, confusing the issue, maybe jamming radar. It was just pure, plain, premeditated murder. Got 100 words in the New York Times. February 9th this year, UNITA took credit for downing another civilian jet. That one wasn't even mentioned, you gotta read the foreign press to find that one out. Now, under the very confused circumstances of KAL 007, if that was the worst atrocity in human history, well, what about the freedom fighters that we support along with South Africa? Who did something much worse, they just purposely shot down a civilian jet. I mean, granted, the only people killed were black or something, but putting that aside, why is it any different? In fact, it's a lot worse. And in fact, since we're the ones who support them, we're the worst barbarians in history, way worse than the Russians. So let's go back a little further, those who have a little bit of memory could remember some other cases. For example, in October 1976, a Cubana airliner was blown up, with 76 people killed, including the Olympic gold medal winning fencing team of Cuba, and the bomb was placed on the plane by the CIA. It was placed by a CIA agent, he's known, he continued to be a CIA agent, continued to carry out other atrocities... Or let's go back a little further. In February 1973, Israel shot down a civilian jet over the Sinai, killing 110 people. The plane was lost in a sand storm. It was about 2 minutes flight time away from Cairo. No confusion, no ambiguity. The orders came from the highest center of the high command. Now this was sort of noticed, there were a couple of references to this in the middle of the KAL 007 business. Predictably, a series of lies were produced, in the New York Times and elsewhere, saying that the situation was totally different because Israel has taken responsibility and paid compensation. If you look back, you find that Israel did not take responsibility, and refused to pay compensation. They agreed to something else, what's called ex gratia compensation, meaning just sort of pure humanitarian aid, which is easy enough because we paid for it. But they refused to pay compensation, because that would imply responsibility, and they refused any responsibility. In fact, what they did is exactly what the Russians did: they put a couple of pilots on television, and they told how what they did was exactly right and just, and they tried to blame the French pilot, he didn't know how to fly... Couple of days after that, Golda Meir came to Washington. She was asked no embarrassing questions about this; the press didn't bother. And she returned home with new military aircrafts. That's the way we responded in that case. There was also editorial comment. The New York Times, which was outraged beyond anything about the Russians, it also had something to say in this case. It had an editorial saying that 'No useful purpose is served by acrimonious debate over assignment of blame'. That was the phrase in this situation of tension... Well, if you look back a little further, you can find other things too. For example, in 1955 an Air-India plane was blown up, with many people killed. In fact, including the people killed was the whole Chinese delegation to the Bandung Conference, the neutralist conference that was held in Indonesia. Turned out the bomb was planted by a CIA agent, who later defected and told the story... The purpose of the operation was to kill Zhou Enlai, who was supposed to be on the plane but by accident had gotten off. So they killed the rest of the delegation, plus everybody else, but not him... And if you bother, you'll find other cases too. All of this is ignored. The one case which was even mentioned, the Israeli one, was falsified... While we have this huge hysteria whipped up about the worst monsters in history... And the press went along with this, virtually 100%. The LA Times is the only newspaper in the US that I know of, that published an honest account of the Israeli case, by Robert Scheer. He published a straight factual account, which gave essentially what I've just said. The other cases were never mentioned -- maybe there's something that I've missed -- but the rest of the press didn't mention any of this stuff. Now, here is an example of the way a really well-disciplined propaganda system works. Total obedience, total subservience to state propaganda. When the state says, 'Whip up hysteria against the evil empire', everybody starts yelling, jumping up and down, and screaming about the evil empire... [Q: how do you pull that off?] That's a very interesting question. See, if it happened in, say, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, we know how they pulled it off. Namely, an order came from the Ministry of Truth, and everybody had to obey it. Now that didn't happen here. Here it happened in the way American propaganda always works: by servility and cowardice and class interest. In other words, we have a relatively centralized media, and there are great advantages to subordinating yourself to external power, which in fact represents your interests anyhow. The mass media are basically big corporations, and they share the interests of other major corporations, which means the interests represented by the state. So it's not too surprising that they'd tend to support state power; what is interesting is the uniformity, the virtual lack of deviance. The fact that in a country as complex as this, one article should appear, referring to one of these incidents, and the others I suppose were barely reported at all. This is something that you find over and over again when looking at the American propaganda system. So for example, take the invasion of South Vietnam. How did we succeed, for 22 years, in preventing essentially 100% of scholarship from referring to a historical event that occurred. Namely, the American invasion of South Vietnam. There is no such event. Take a look in the encyclopedias, the history books, the specialized monographs, and you'll see that there's no such event as the invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, or aggression against South Vietnam - it's just not there... We have a very intricate system, and it does it with consummate skill, and with great success. So on major issues, you just get no deviation at all.

72. Armies usually aren't interested in wars. They like preparation for war. But they have an understandable reluctance to fight a war. So I think if you look at, at least the history that I know, it's usually the civilian leadership who is pushing the military to do something. It was the case in the early days of the Vietnam War.

88. Regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu: [Q: what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?] In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United State had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U.S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U.S. military doctrine is that U.S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U.S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U.S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U.S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.

93. ...obviously the Serbs had contingency plans, as every sane person knew. The US has contingency plans to invade Canada. Israel has contingency plans to expel Palestinians, and few sane people doubt that they would carry them out if under attack. That's what military planners do for a living. [...] In that book I reviewed the kind of material selected from the OSCE report by the Irish TV announcer, but also reviewed the material that would have been selected by his exact counterpart in Belgrade, and the full conclusions.

113. I think that the polls taken in Baghdad explain it very well, they seem to understand. The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy, right in the heart of the world's energy producing regions. To create, if they can, a dependent client state. To have permanent military bases. And to gain what's called 'critical leverage' - I'm quoting Zbigniew Brzezinski - to gain critical leverage over rivals, the European and Asian economies. It's been understood since the Second World War, that if you have your hand on that spigot, the main source of the world's energy, you have what early planners called 'veto power' over others. Iraq is also the last part of the world where there are vast, untapped, easily accessible energy resources. And you can be sure that they want the profits from that to go primarily to U.S.-based multinationals and back to the U.S. Treasury, not to rivals. There are plenty of reasons for invading Iraq.

119. The US-UK would, doubtless, be as eager to draw their troops down in Iraq as Hitler was in occupied France and Norway, and the Russians were in Eastern Europe. And on the same condition. That local authorities will be able to ensure order and obedience to the master.

127. I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off. So I was very much involved in the resistance, but I was never against the draft. I disagreed with a lot of my friends and associates on that, for a very good reason, I think at least, as nobody seems to agree. In my view, if there's going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizens' army. Now, here I do agree with some people, the top brass, they don't want a citizens' army. They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam War, the U.S. military realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever in the history of European imperialism, including us, they had used a citizens' army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French Foreign Legion, the Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking, like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars. They're just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army started falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was because the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officers. The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And that's why I think that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I'm in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars... it ought to be a citizens' army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military.

128. My feeling then, and now, is that IF there is to be an army, then the burden of service should be shared, not assigned to the disadvantaged by one or another means, as in the case of all onerous tasks. That does not imply that those called upon to share the burden should necessarily agree. There are always cases where refusal is justified, and refusal to serve in Vietnam was, in my opinion, one such case. Same always. Garbage collection should be shared, not assigned to the disadvantaged, but if someone is ordered to dump toxic wastes in a schoolyard, he or she should refuse.

157. ...immediately after the 1954 Geneva Accords on a peaceful settlement for Indochina, which Washington refused to accept, the National Security Council secretly decreed that even in the case of 'local Communist subversion or rebellion NOT CONSTITUTING ARMED ATTACK' (my emphasis) the US would consider the use of military force, including an attack on China if it is 'determined to be the source' of the 'subversion'; the NSC also called for converting Thailand into 'the focal point of U.S. covert and psychological operations in Southeast Asia,' undertaking 'covert operations on a large and effective scale' throughout Indochina, and in general, acting forcefully to undermine the Accords and the UN Charter. The wording, repeated verbatim annually in planning documents, was chosen so as to make explicit the US right to violate Article 51 of the Charter, which permits the use of force only in immediate self-defense against 'armed attack.' The US proceeded to define 'aggression' to include 'political warfare, or subversion,' what UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson called 'internal aggression' while defending JFK's escalation in South Vietnam. US attacks were therefore transmuted into 'self-defense' against 'internal aggression.' When the US bombed Libyan cities in 1986, the official justification was 'self defense against future attack,' a ludicrous distortion of the Charter applauded by legal specialists in the national press. The US invasion of Panama was defended in the Security Council by appeal to Article 51, which, US Ambassador Pickering declared, 'provides for the use of armed force to defend a country, to defend our interests and our people,' and permits the U.S. to invade Panama to prevent its 'territory from being used as a base for smuggling drugs into the United States' -- an astonishing concept of 'armed attack,' which passed without criticism. In June 1993, when Clinton launched a missile attack on Baghdad, killing civilians, UN Ambassador Albright appealed to Article 51, explaining that the bombing was in 'self-defense against armed attack' -- namely, an alleged attempt to assassinate former president Bush two months earlier. The claim would have been remarkable even if the US had had credible evidence of Iraqi involvement, which, officials conceded, they did not. These and innumerable other examples illustrate far-reaching contempt for the rule of law. The US has always relied on the rule of force in international affairs. International law, treaties, the World Court, War Crimes Tribunals, moral judgment, etc., are regularly invoked against enemies, often quite accurately.

270. I really don't believe [that Pat Tillman opposed the war in Iraq and was going to meet Noam Chomsky], and I think you got it from one of those documents Mary Mapes handed to Dan Rather. --Ann Coulter, September 27, 2005 [251]

275. For all the propaganda of al Jazeera, the wounded pride of the Arab Street, or the vitriol of the Western Left, years from now the truth will remain that our soldiers did not come to plunder or colonize, but were willing to die for others' freedom when few others would. Neither Michael Moore nor Noam Chomsky can change that, because it is not opinion, but truth... --Victor Davis Hanson, June 30, 2006 [256]