58 Chomsky Quotes

In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.

The US and Israel have demanded further that Palestinians not only recognize Israel's rights as a state in the international system, but that they also recognize Israel's abstract 'right to exist,' a concept that has no place in international law or diplomacy, and a right claimed by no one. In effect, the US and Israel are demanding that Palestinians not only recognize Israel in the normal fashion of interstate relations, but also formally accept the legitimacy of their expulsion from their own land. They cannot be expected to accept that, just as Mexico does not grant the US the 'right to exist' on half of Mexico's territory, gained by conquest.

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure 'to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention.' [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some 'grave breaches,' including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [..] and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.

Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: 'Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.' Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power's sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right. [...] According to Noam Chomsky, communism 'was a monstrosity,' and 'the collapse of tyranny' in Eastern Europe and Russia is 'an occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values freedom and human dignity.' I treasure freedom and human dignity yet find no occasion for rejoicing. The postcommunist societies do not represent a net gain for such values. If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialism, with its correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere. --Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997 [199]

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.

Israel is an embattled country. They rely very heavily on U.S. support. So they have developed a very sophisticated system of propaganda. They don't call it propaganda. They call it hasbarah. It is the only country I know of in the world that refers to propaganda as explanation. The Ministry of Propaganda is the Ministry of Explanation. The idea being that our position on everything is so obviously correct that if we only explain it to people, they will see that it is right.

[Q: Zionism=racism?] It's necessary, first of all, to distinguish between Zionism and the practices of the State of Israel. The practices are undoubtedly racist. As for Zionism as such, a more accurate charge would be that it was colonialist, in some ways the last episode of old-fashioned European colonialism. But even that somewhat overstates, because the ideology covered a lot of ground, as nationalist ideologies commonly do. And in this case, as in all, there are particularities to consider. That aside, the condemnation of the policies of Israel as racist, while correct, reeks of hypocrisy. Simply look at the practices of those who are issuing the charges.

[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.

Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today. He is also a disturbingly divided intellectual. On the one hand there is a large body of revolutionary and highly technical linguistic scholarship, much of it too difficult for anyone but the professional linguist or philosopher; on the other, an equally substantial body of political writings, accessible to any literate person but often maddeningly simple-minded. The 'Chomsky problem' is to explain how these two fit together. --Paul Robinson/New York Times, February 25, 1979 [187]

Yet [Chomsky's The Responsibility of Intellectuals essay] defined the peace movement as much as any document and pushed the name Chomsky up there with Thoreau and Emerson in the literature of rebellion. --Rolling Stone, May 28, 1992 [188]

Reading Chomsky is like standing in a wind tunnel. With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us--and to discern what they are leaving out. The answers become clear enough, he says. The catch is they won't be the ones we want to hear. [...] Chomsky, as he often does, has a voice problem. He is shrill and sarcastic--chiefly because he's angry with what he sees as rampant American hypocrisy. [...] If there is anything new about our age, it is that the questions Chomsky raises will eventually have to be answered. Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening. --BusinessWeek, April 17, 2000 [189]

How did we ever get to be an empire? The writings of Noam Chomsky -- America's most useful citizen, in my opinion -- are the best answer to that question. --Boston Globe, April 25, 2004 [190]

The major international campaign orchestrated against Chomsky on completely false pretexts was only part - though perhaps a crucial part - of the ambitious campaign launched in the late 70s with the hope of reconstructing the ideology of power and domination which had been partially exposed during the Indochina war. The magnitude of the insane attack against Chomsky, which aimed at silencing him and robbing him of his moral stature and his prestige and influence, is of course one more tribute to the impact of his writings and his actions - not for nothing he was the only one singled out. --Carlos P. Otero, Language and Politics, 1988 [193]

Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky's work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he's up against. He's like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It's as though he disagrees with the literature and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests. --Arundhati Roy, August 24, 2003 [202]

Regarding his personal character traits the most outstanding is that he is absolutely faithful, which is something very few people possess... Professor Chomsky will never betray you, never, it is impossible. --Norman Finkelstein, November 24, 2003 [203]

[Bush Administration neoconservatives are] the ones who broke nearly every precedent of foreign policy in the post-Cold-War world. They're the ones who chose preventative war over international law. That's what I view as destructive, not Noam Chomsky pointing it out. --Chalmers Johnson, February 2005 [204]

He would have us believe that Israel's occupation and harsh actions against the Palestinians, its invasions and undeclared 20-year war on Lebanon, and its arming of murderous regimes in Central America and Africa during the Cold War, has been done as a client state in the service of US interests. In Chomsky's worldview, that absolves Israel of responsibility and has become standard Chomsky doctrine. --Jeffrey Blankfort, May 25, 2005 [205]

The best thing about Chomsky is that he raises the blood pressure anti-Lefties far more than he deserves. Still, Chomsky's about as challenging as Mr. Rogers. 'Hi kids, won't you be my Culturally Sensitive Leftie Neighbor? Good, today kids, we're gonna talk about the evil things America has done in Nicaragua. Can you say Nee-karrrrooah-ooah?' In a word, Chomsky is why the Left stumbled through the 90s righteously gumming its enemies rather than raptor-gutting them. --Mark Ames, December 2, 2005 [206]

The Americans' very conviction that their goals are good blinds them to the consequences of their acts. To focus on intentions is to prolong a futile clash of inflamed self-righteousness; to focus on behavior and results could get us somewhere. I detect in Professor Chomsky's approach, in his uncomplicated attribution of evil objectives to his foes, in his fondness for abstract principles, in his moral impatience, the mirror image of the very features that both he and I dislike in American foreign policy. To me sanity does not consist of replying to a crusade with an anti-crusade. As scholars and as citizens, we must require and provide discriminating and disciplined reasoning on behalf of our values. --Stanley Hoffmann, March 1969 [207]

[Noam Chomsky] seems to feel licensed to forget or distort the truth whenever it suits his polemical convenience. He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook. --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., December 1969 [208]

The three paragraphs of Mr. Chomsky to which I have referred constitute less than five percent of his article. I do not know if the level of veracity which he achieves in them is typical of the entire piece. If these paragraphs are representative, however, the article as a whole should contain, by conservative extrapolation, approximately 94 other serious distortions and misstatements of fact. --Samuel Huntington, February 1970 [209]

Marxist intellectuals can and do convince themselves to subordinate mind and ethics to a larger goal or distant cause that frequently slips out of sight. Anarchist intellectuals are less susceptible to this logic. To use the language of historical materialism, it is no accident that currently an anarchist, Noam Chomsky, is the most energetic critic of intellectuals apologizing for American foreign policy. --Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 1987 [210]

He seems both wholly cynical about the purposes of those in power, and wholly unforgiving. Those who direct American policy - and, by implication, those who direct the policy of any state - are allowed no regrets, no morals, no feelings, and when they change their policies they appear to do so for entirely Machiavellian reasons. Chomsky has little interest in the question of 'good in bad' - of how there can be good behaviour in the context of bad policies - and seems to deny the complexity of human affairs... --Martin Woollacott, January 14, 1989 [211]

[Noam Chomsky is] so far out on the lunatic fringe that even the sensible things he has to say are lost. --David Rieff, August 4, 1991 [212]

As I read your remarks about how Kosovo reverses the usual left/right roles on intervention, I found myself wondering what Noam Chomsky--who epitomized the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western intervention--is saying now. Well, I couldn't find anything about the current crisis, but thanks to the miracle of search engine technology I did find some remarks about Bosnia, which are pathetic but revealing: First he tries to blame it all on the Western Right, then suddenly gets all judicious and practical. --Paul Krugman, March 29, 1999 [213]

Chomsky is an irresistible example of the quality problem that besets the market for academic public intellectuals. --Richard Posner, 2001 [214]

[Noam Chomsky has] become the guru of the new anti-capitalist and Third World movements. They take his views very uncritically; it's part of the Seattle mood - whatever America does is wrong. He confronts orthodoxy but he's becoming a big simplifier. What he can't see is Third World and other regimes that are oppressive and not controlled by America. --Fred Halliday, January 2001 [215]

Chomsky just has not entered deeply into what he is talking about and he is not greatly interested in anything except digging out material for anti-American invective. --Adrian Hastings, June 2001 [216]

Sneering critics like Noam Chomsky, who condemn the executioners of thousands only in passing, would not hesitate to honour the vengeful feelings of Palestinians subjected to Israeli occupation. They have no standing. --Todd Gitlin, September 23, 2001 [217]

He defended Faurrison. He championed the Khmer Rouge. His condemnations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are one hundred percent one-sided, based on the (obviously) false notion that the Arab nations and the Palestinian people have been trying to arrange a peace with Israel for decades. He viewed the rescue mission undertaken in Kosovo as nothing more than the extension of imperial power. He accuses the United States of perpetrating a holocaust in Afghanistan and thinks that the mistaken attack on the pharmaceutical factory in Somalia [sic] was as bad if not worse than the attack on the Twin Towers. One could go on, but it all adds up to, I fear, the mirror image of the ignorant jingoism of Bennett, Krauthammer, Kelly, Will, etc. And I find it amazing that intelligent people take it seriously. --Eric Alterman, June 2002 [219]

Here's a man who says that Washington is incurably sinful but offers no, there's no complexity, no problem, no moral dilemmas in the book. Everything really that those in power do is seen as essentially and necessarily wrong, while public opinion is deemed to be faultless. --Adam Roberts, May 15, 2006 [230]

Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose. It is important to recognise this fact because the Chomskian analysis has become the defining dissident voice of the blogosphere and a certain kind of far-left academia. --Peter Beaumont, June 18, 2006 [231]

It's hard to imagine any American reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and deeply troubling, light. --Jonathan Freedland, June 25, 2006 [233]

The Left's spiritual leader, Noam Chomsky, went to Hezbollah - a murderous, extremist, nationalistic organization by its own leaders' account - and saluted. The fascism of the Left, like that of the Right, does not believe in the possibility of the righteousness of anyone else. They claim that there is only one truth. We have known this since the days when in front of the 'Sun of the Nations' who murdered millions, people stood and said that the revolution there is also ours. --Yoram Kaniuk, July 23, 2006 [235]

[Hegemony or Survival describes] a world in which, chronology be damned, 9/11 seems like an understandable response, if not justifiable one, to our attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. --Carlin Romano, September 23, 2006 [236]

Chomsky's hatred of the United States is pathological -- stemming from some bilious problem with father figures that is too fetid to explore. --Camille Paglia, October 27, 2006 [237]

Chomsky once told a group of people that he himself was 'agnostic' on whether the Holocaust occurred. When professor Robert Nozick, who was part of the group, confronted Chomsky with this outrageous statement following a debate at Harvard Medical School, Chomsky shoved Nozick, saying, 'How dare you quote an off-the-record remark I made to a small group at Princeton.' He did not deny making the statement. --Alan Dershowitz, June 1, 2007 [238]

Noam Chomsky: He's really an interventionist - and also completely clueless. --Justin Raimondo, January 18, 2002 [241]

In fact, Chomsky's influence is best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader of a secular religious cult - as the ayatollah of anti-American hate. --David Horowitz, September 26, 2001 [242]

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the terrorists who planned and executed the attacks of September 11 were merely expressing in more refined form the same anti-Americanism that has been a staple of the American university for three decades. The ravings of Osama bin Laden and those of, for instance, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, are interchangeable. --Mackubin Thomas Owens, October 2001 [243]

I want Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities about as much as I want Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing. These are wild and extremist ideas that I believe have no place in a university. --Daniel Pipes, September 2002 [245]

Although he lost some of his appeal in the late-1970s and 1980s by his defense of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, he has used September 11 to restore his reputation, indeed to surpass his former influence and stature. --Keith Windschuttle, May 2003 [246]

Chomsky blasts the United States for having supported [post WWII] internal movements to liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet totalitarianism. 'These operations included a 'secret army' under U.S.-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s.' This U.S.-Nazi army is so 'secret' that only Chomsky knows of it, and he has thus far kept the documentation of it to himself, lest his secret get out. --Daniel Flynn, Intellectual Morons, 2004 [247]

There are some views-, people who support the Soviet Union, as Chomsky did for so long, who've supported tyranny in all sorts of places, like Chomsky has done, who have lied consistently, as Chomsky has done, who do not deserve fundamental respect in this sense. [...] And he is making millions around the world preaching anti-American- --Andrew Sullivan, November 5, 2004, [249]

Chomsky says America is a warring country seeking to build an empire, not a liberator trying to achieve peace, freedom, and democracy. --Debbie Schlussel, February 21, 2006 [254]

I personally regard Chomsky as a kook and a half on toast. --Jimmy Wales, December 8, 2001 [260]

[Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a 'Holocaust denier' or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story. 2004

The Grand Inquisitor explains that you have to create mysteries because otherwise the common people will be able to understand things. They have to be subordinated so you have to make things look mysterious and complicated. That's the test of the intellectual. It's also good for them: then you're an important person, talking big words which nobody can understand. Sometimes it gets kind of comical, say in post-modern discourse. Especially around Paris, it has become a comic strip, I mean it's all gibberish. But it's very inflated, a lot of television cameras, a lot of posturing. They try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There's nothing there. But these are the ways in which contemporary intellectuals, including those on the Left, create great careers for themselves, power for themselves, marginalize people, intimidate people and so on.

The Oslo agreements did represent a shift in U.S.-Israeli policy. Both states had by then come to recognize that it is a mistake to use the Israel Defense Forces to run the territories. It is much wiser to resort to the traditional colonial pattern of relying on local clients to control the subject population, in the manner of the British in India, South Africa under apartheid, the U.S. in Central America, and other classic cases. That is the assigned role of the Palestinian Authority, which like its predecessors, has to follow a delicate path: it must maintain some credibility among the population, while serving as a second oppressor, both militarily and economically, in coordination with the primary power centers that retain ultimate control. The long-term goal of the Oslo process was described accurately by Shlomo Ben-Ami shortly before he joined the Barak government: it is to establish a condition of permanent neo-colonialist dependency. The mechanisms have been spelled out explicitly in the successive interim agreements; and more important, implemented on the ground.

Before there were any suicide bombers, it was also reported by the same sources that Saddam Hussein was giving $10,000 to the families of anyone who was killed by Israeli atrocities, and there were plenty of them. Well, should he've been doing that? So let's take the first month of the current intifada. I'm just relying now on IDF sources. What they say is, that in the first few days of the intifada, the Israeli army fired a million bullets. One of the high military officers said 'that means one bullet for every child'. Within the first month of the intifada, they killed about 70 people. Using U.S. helicopters, and in fact Clinton shipped new helicopters to Israel as soon as they started using them against civilians. That's just the first month. And it goes on, no suicide bombers. At the time, it was reported that Saddam Hussein was giving $10,000 to every family. Well, is that supporting terror? It seems to me, sending helicopters to Israel when they're using them to attack apartment complexes, that's supporting terror.

Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations- he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction. --Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument ('The 'We' Fallacy'), February 1988

Unlike many leftists of his generation, Chomsky never flirted with movements or organizations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, antirevolutionary, or elitist. Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism offered to many of Chomsky's disillusioned contemporaries an alternative to what they saw as blatantly exclusionary American-style capitalism. When reports about what had actually occurred in the former Soviet Union and China began to filter through, many felt betrayed. We now hear a lot about how the left has been discredited, the hopelessness of utopian thinking, the futility of activist struggle, but little about the libertarian options that Chomsky and others have so consistently presented. The type of dismay that has permeated contemporary intellectual circles has not touched Chomsky. He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century. And yet, most of his criticisms of American policy, past and present, are seldom mentioned in the mainstream press or by the instructors and professors who teach history or politics. Political science departments rarely use his material on Vietnam, the Cold War, Central America, or Israel. --Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1997 [198]

It is tempting to follow a policy of malign neglect toward Chomsky's latest screed. But ignoring the book may foster the false impression that Chomsky's revelations are somehow too explosive to be challenged in a major newspaper. A far wiser course is to point out the inconsistent arguments and shrill assertions that are Chomsky's contribution to the public debate. [...] It would be unfortunate if Chomsky's momentary popularity overshadows infinitely more reasoned critiques of Bush administration policies. There are serious questions that should be weighed as America girds for final war against Saddam Hussein and dispatches military advisers to nations like the Philippines. Chomsky and his camp followers do not have a monopoly on dissent. The best response to the frenzied e-mailed dispatches from this left-wing crank remains public disclosure and ridicule. --Walter Shapiro, May 7, 2002 [218]

...the self-indulgent and auto-congratulatory Noam Chomsky, arguably one of the most virulent anti-Semitic Jews you can hope to encounter. His endless diatribes on what he wants you to believe to be the horrible treatment of the Palestinian people at the hands of the cold-hearted Israeli oppressors are unparalleled in literary hyperbole. Unfortunately, he doesn't offer one shred of evidence to back this up. He invites you to join him, the consummate Jewish intellect, in collective snobbery by simply accepting (because you are so frightfully well-educated as he is) that what he says is so. I have yet to see one single person stand up and ask, 'Dr. Chomsky, what is the evidence for this?' Should this take place, hopefully there will be a paramedic team standing by to resuscitate him. --Moss David Posner, July 3, 2006 [234]

The radicals moved their support, in a peculiar way, to the successor of the USSR too, Putin's Russia. The genocidal war of Russia in Chechnya - far worse than the war in Iraq, immeasurably worse than the light conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians - is met with silence. The radicals supported the Russian side - Serbia - in the civil war in Yugoslavia, opposed the American intervention in the war that stopped the genocide, and the radical guru Noam Chomsky even denied that a massacre in Srebrenica took place. When this inconvenient fact was published - not the first or last time that Chomsky loses touch with reality - he initiated a media campaign, that managed to get the Guardian to retract the piece. On the same occasion, the Guardian removed an angry letter of a survivor of a Serbian concentration camp. By the way, the interview with Chomsky revolved around Chomsky's defense of the right of a Holocaust denier to free speech. It turns out that the survivors of the massacre that Chomsky supported have no right to free speech. --Yossi Gurevich, June 2, 2007 [239]