4 Noam Chomsky Quotes on State power

Noam Chomsky quotes on state power

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.

20. The political policies that are called conservative these days would appal any genuine conservative, if there were one around to be appalled. For example, the central policy of the Reagan Administration - which was supposed to be conservative - was to build up a powerful state. The state grew in power more under Reagan than in any peacetime period, even if you just measure it by state expenditures. The state intervention in the economy vastly increased. That's what the Pentagon system is, in fact; it's the creation of a state-guaranteed market and subsidy system for high-technology production. There was a commitment under the Reagan Administration to protect this more powerful state from the public, which is regarded as the domestic enemy. Take the resort to clandestine operations in foreign policy: that means the creation of a powerful central state immune from public inspection. Or take the increased efforts at censorship and other forms of control. All of these are called 'conservatism,' but they're the very opposite of conservatism. Whatever the term means, it involves a concern for Enlightenment values of individual rights and freedoms against powerful external authorities such as the state, a dominant Church, and so on. That kind of conservatism no one even remembers anymore.

130. States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.

173. It's extremely important to preserve freedom of speech, and not to grant the state the right to determine what is or isn't said. A sometimes conflicting right is privacy and protection against verbal or other forms of violence. Once the state is granted the right to prevent speech (writing, songs, etc.) that it claims might precipitate harm, we're on a very dangerous slope. That's why the Supreme Court, in 1969, finally reached the standard of protection of speech that was proposed during the Enlightenment (and I believe may be unique to the US): speech is protected until the point where it is part of imminent criminal acts. So if you and I go into a store to rob it, you have a gun, and I say 'shoot,' that's not protected speech. How far should it go? Very delicate questions, and my personal feeling is that one should err on the side of restricting state power, as a general rule.