3 Noam Chomsky Quotes on Warfare

Noam Chomsky quotes on warfare

92. We might add now that we do have an authoritative account of why the United States bombed Serbia in 1999. It comes from Strobe Talbott, now the director of the Brookings Institution, but in 1999 he was in charge of the State Department-Pentagon team that supervised the diplomacy in the affair. He wrote the introduction to a recent book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, which presents the position of the Clinton administration at the time of the bombing. Norris writes that 'it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war'. In brief, they were resisting absorption into the U.S. dominated international socioeconomic system. Talbott adds that thanks to John Norris, anyone interested in the war in Kosovo 'will know ... how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved' in the war, actually directing it. This authoritative explanation will come as no surprise at all to students of international affairs who are more interested in fact than rhetoric. And it will also come as no surprise, to those familiar with intellectual life, that the attack continues to be hailed as a grand achievement of humanitarian intervention, despite massive Western documentation to the contrary, and now an explicit denial at the highest level; which will change nothing, it's not the way intellectual life works.

105. Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

110. To gain control over this resource, and have probably military bases there, is a tremendous achievement for world control. You read counter-arguments to this, and they're worth looking at. So it's argued that it can't be true, because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be greater than the profits that will be made. Well, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but it's totally irrelevant. And the reason is because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be paid by the taxpayer, by you, and the profits are gonna go right into the pockets of the energy corporations. So yeah, it doesn't matter how they balance out, it's just another taxpayer subsidy to the rich.