N Chomsky Quotes

[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.

Actually, if you looked closely, even N.A.F.T.A.'s advocates conceded that it was probably going to harm the majority of the populations of the three countries. For instance, its advocates in the United States were saying, "It's really good, it'll only harm semi-skilled workers"―footnote: 70 percent of the workforce. As a matter of fact, after N.A.F.T.A. was safely passed, the New York Times did their first analysis of its predicted effects in the New York region: it was a very upbeat article talking about how terrific it was going to be for corporate lawyers and P.R. firms and so on. And then there was a footnote there as well. It said, well, everyone can't gain, there'll also be some losers: "women, blacks, Hispanics, and semi-skilled labor"―in other words, most of the people of New York. But you can't have everything. And those were the advocates.

Take Canada again: why does Canada have the health-care program it does? Up until the mid-1960s, Canada and the United States had the same capitalist health service: extremely inefficient, tons of bureaucracy, huge administrative costs, millions of people with no insurance coverage―exactly what would be amplified in the United States by Clinton's proposals for "managed competition" [put forward in 1993].21 But in 1962 in Saskatchewan, where the N.D.P. is pretty strong and the unions are pretty strong, they managed to put through a kind of rational health-care program of the sort that every industrialized country in the world has by now, except the United States and South Africa. Well, when Saskatchewan first put through that program, the doctors and the insurance companies and the business community were all screaming―but it worked so well that pretty soon all the other Provinces wanted the same thing too, and within a couple years guaranteed health care had spread over the entire country. And that happened largely because of the New Democratic Party in Canada, which does provide a kind of cover and a framework within which popular organizations like unions, and then later things like the feminist movement, have been able to get together and do things.

M.R.: In the humanities certain professors spend their time in effect teaching their Ph.D. thesis. N.C.: Anybody who teaches at age fifty what he was teaching at age twenty-five had better find another profession. If in twenty-five years nothing has happened which proves to you that your ideas were wrong, it means that you are not in a living field, or perhaps are part of a religious sect.

George Armstrong Custer a massacré les Indiens Lakota. Sheridan a exterminé les bisons, pour faire mourir de faim le peuple des grandes plaines. Un crime organisé, froidement pensé et systématiquement mis en ouvre. Arrosé de whisky frelaté. Ensuite, et depuis, il y a eu la Corée, le Vietnam, Cuba, La Grenade, Haïti, le Guatemala, le Nicaragua, l'Irak, l'Afghanistan. L'Amérique n'est pas un rêve. Elle ne l'a jamais été. L'eau du Mississippi ne sera jamais lavée du sang et des larmes du peuple noir. Antiaméricain ? Je suis frère de Geronimo, de Mumia Abu-Jamal et de Noam Chomsky.

Parler des affaires du monde est une chose banale. Il faut travailler un peu, lire un peu, réfléchir - rien de très profond. L'idée que cela nécessite des qualifications spéciales n'est qu'une escroquerie de plus.