Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

With regard to the domestic scene, take the fact that the criminal justice system increasingly is becoming a system for targeting the poor and minorities, who are being turned into people under military occupation. Look, that’s an easy one to change—you really just have to change public opinion on that one. You aren’t striking at the core of private power when you begin to have a civilized criminal justice system instead of a brutal, barbaric one. So that’s an example of something I think is changeable. Or you could start by getting us to stop torturing people in the Third World, right? Easy things to do are, stop killing children in Cuba, stop massacring people in East Timor, get people in the United States to realize that Palestinians are human beings—those are easy things. So let’s do those, first do the easy things.