How the World Works Quotes

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“Speaking truth to power makes no sense. There's no point in speaking truth to Henry Kissinger, he knows it already. Instead speak truth to the powerless. Or better, with the powerless. Then they'll act to dismantle illegitimate power.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“Take democracy. According to the common-sense meaning, a society is democratic to the extent that people can participate in a meaningful way in managing their affairs. But the doctrinal meaning of democracy is different—it refers to a system in which decisions are made by sectors of the business community and related elites. The public are to be only “spectators of action,” not “participants,” as leading democratic theorists (in this case, Walter Lippmann) have explained. They are permitted to ratify the decisions of their betters and to lend their support to one or another of them, but not to interfere with matters—like public policy—that are none of their business.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“(I think, legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.) The”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“If you abandon the political arena, somebody is going to be there. Corporations aren't going to go home and join the PTA. They are going to run things.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it’s doing. There is only one way to do it—become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you’ve lost your capacity to understand what’s happening.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“Why is it important to keep the general population in line? Any form of concentrated power doesn’t want to be subjected to popular democratic control—or, for that matter, to market discipline. That’s why powerful sectors, including corporate wealth, are naturally opposed to functioning democracy, just as they’re opposed to functioning markets…for themselves, at least. It’s just natural. They don’t want external constraints on their capacity to make decisions and act freely.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“There has always been racism. But it developed as a leading principle of thought and perception in the context of colonialism. That’s understandable. When you have your boot on someone’s neck, you have to justify it. The justification has to be their depravity. It’s very striking to see this in the case of people who aren’t very different from one another. Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren’t human. They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“The British succeeded. India deindustrialized, it ruralized. As the industrial revolution spread in England, India was turning into a poor, ruralized and agrarian country. It wasn’t until 1846, when their competitors had been destroyed and they were way ahead, that Britain suddenly discovered the merits of free trade. Read the British liberal historians, the big advocates of free trade—they were very well aware of it. Right through that period they say: “Look, what we’re doing to India isn’t pretty, but there’s no other way for the mills of Manchester to survive. We have to destroy the competition.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“We’re supposed to believe that the press is liberal, dangerous, adversarial, out-of-control. That itself is an extremely good example of corporate propaganda.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000 deaths.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“The doctrinal system, which produces what we call “propaganda” when discussing enemies, has two distinct targets. One target is what’s sometimes called the “political class,” the roughly 20% of the population that’s relatively educated, more or less articulate, playing some role in decision-making. Their acceptance of doctrine is crucial, because they’re in a position to design and implement policy. Then there’s the other 80% or so of the population. These are Lippmann’s “spectators of action,” whom he referred to as the “bewildered herd.” They are supposed to follow orders and keep out of the way of the important people. They’re the target of the real mass media: the tabloids, the sitcoms, the Super Bowl and so on. These sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable—if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“Now let’s turn to the other extreme, to the doves. The leading dove was undoubtedly George Kennan, who headed the State Department planning staff until 1950, when he was replaced by Nitze—Kennan’s office, incidentally, was responsible for the Gehlen network. Kennan was one of the most intelligent and lucid of US planners, and a major figure in shaping the postwar world. His writings are an extremely interesting illustration of the dovish position. One document to look at if you want to understand your country is Policy Planning Study 23, written by Kennan for the State Department planning staff in 1948. Here’s some of what it says: We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population....In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity....To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives....We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. PPS 23 was, of course, a top-secret document. To pacify the public, it was necessary to trumpet the “idealistic slogans” (as is still being done constantly), but here planners were talking to one another.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“It has to do with conquest, with oppression. If you’re robbing somebody, oppressing them, dictating their lives, it’s a very rare person who can say: Look, I’m a monster. I’m doing this for my own good. Even Himmler didn’t say that. A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression, whether it’s throwing them in gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner store, or anything in between. The standard reaction is to say: It’s their depravity. That’s why I’m doing it. Maybe I’m even doing them good. If it’s their depravity, there’s got to be something about them that makes them different from me. What’s different about them will be whatever you can find. And that’s the justification. Then it becomes racism. You can always find something—they have a different color hair or eyes, they’re too fat, or they’re gay. You find something that’s different enough. Of course you can lie about it, so it’s easier to find.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“The first secretary of defense, General Henry Knox, said that what we’re doing to the native population is worse than what the conquistadors did in Peru and Mexico. He said future historians will look at the “destruction” of these people—what would nowadays be called genocide—and paint the acts with “sable colors” [in other words, darkly]. This was known all the way through. Long after John Quincy Adams, the intellectual father of Manifest Destiny, left power, he became an opponent of both slavery and the policy toward the Indians. He said he’d been involved—along with the rest of them—in a crime of “extermination” of such enormity that surely God would punish them for these “heinous sins.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“You might look back at the Zionist movement—there were plenty of Jews killed by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors and people they thought were traitors. And they weren’t under anything like the harsh conditions of the Palestinian occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed out, the British weren’t nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us. The Labor-based defense force Haganah had torture chambers and assassins. I once looked up their first recorded assassination in the official Haganah history. It’s described there straight. It was in 1921. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan had to be killed, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between them and the new Jewish settlers. His murderer was assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first president of Israel. They said that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“I heard Steven Solarz [former Democratic congressman from Brooklyn] on the BBC. He said the world has a double standard: 700,000 Yemenis were expelled from Saudi Arabia and no one said a word (which is true); 415 Palestinians get expelled from Gaza and the West Bank and everybody’s screaming. Every Stalinist said the same thing: “We sent Sakharov into exile and everyone was screaming. What about this or that other atrocity—which is worse?” There is always somebody who has committed a worse atrocity. For a Stalinist mimic like Solarz, why not use the same line? Incidentally, there is a difference—the Yemenis were deported to their country, the Palestinians from their country. Would Solarz claim that we all should be silent if he and his family were dumped into a desert in Mexico?”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“(We’re in favor of independence as long as it’s in other people’s empires, not in our own.)”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“military.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“bonanza”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“So you could say that one alternative to the free market system is the one we already have, because we often don’t rely on the market where powerful interests would be damaged. Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free-market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful. For example, the US has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. It’s been understood that a system of private enterprise can survive only if there is extensive government intervention. It’s needed to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, and to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc. But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system. Internationally, the Pentagon was an intervention force, but domestically it was a method by which the government could coordinate the private economy, provide welfare to major corporations, subsidize them, arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the US economy has relied on this kind of government involvement.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“The Iran/Contra cover-up The major elements of the Iran/Contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal Contra war run out of Ollie North’s White House office were connected. The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran—you could read it on the front page of the New York Times. In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/Contra hearings appeared on BBC television [the British Broadcasting Company, Britain’s national broadcasting service] and described how they had helped organize an arms flow to the Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime, “with the cooperation of the United States…at almost the highest level.” The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah—standard operating procedure. As for the Contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a US supply plane was shot down and a US agent, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured). The media simply chose to look the other way. So what finally generated the Iran/Contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the Contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Teheran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged. We then move to the next phase: damage control. That’s what the follow-up was about. For more on all of this, see my Fateful Triangle (1983), Turning the Tide (1985), and Culture of Terrorism (1987).”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“Don’t tread on me I’m not quite clear about how to formulate this question. It has to do with the nature of US society as exemplified in comments like do your own thing, go it alone, don’t tread on me, the pioneer spirit— all that deeply individualistic stuff. What does that tell you about American society and culture? It tells you that the propaganda system is working full-time, because there is no such ideology in the US. Business certainly doesn’t believe it. All the way back to the origins of American society, business has insisted on a powerful, interventionist state to support its interests, and it still does. There’s nothing individualistic about corporations. They’re big conglomerate institutions, essentially totalitarian in character. Within them, you’re a cog in a big machine. There are few institutions in human society that have such strict hierarchy and top-down control as a business organization. It’s hardly don’t tread on me—you’re being tread on all the time. The point of the ideology is to prevent people who are outside the sectors of coordinated power from associating with each other and entering into decision-making in the political arena. The point is to leave the powerful sectors highly integrated and organized, while atomizing everyone else. That aside, there is another factor. There’s a streak of independence and individuality in American culture that I think is a very good thing. This don’t tread on me feeling is in many respects a healthy one—up to the point where it keeps you from working together with other people.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“What about the role of the CIA in a democratic society? Is that an oxymoron? You could imagine a democratic society with an organization that carries out intelligence-gathering functions. But that’s a very minor part of what the CIA does. Its main purpose is to carry out secret and usually illegal activities for the executive branch, which wants to keep these activities secret because it knows that the public won’t accept them. So even inside the US, it’s highly undemocratic. The activities that it carries out are quite commonly efforts to undermine democracy, as in Chile through the 1960s into the early 1970s. That’s far from the only example. By the way, although most people focus on Nixon’s and Kissinger’s involvement with the CIA, Kennedy and Johnson carried out similar policies.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“But until you ask why there’s an increase in social disintegration, and why more and more resources are being directed towards the wealthy and privileged sectors and away from the general population, you can’t have even a concept of why there’s rising crime or how you should deal with it. Over the past twenty or thirty years, there’s been a considerable increase in inequality. This trend accelerated during the Reagan years. The society has been moving visibly towards a kind of Third World model. The result is an increasing crime rate, as well as other signs of social disintegration. Most of the crime is poor people attacking each other, but it spills over to more privileged sectors. People are very worried—and quite properly, because the society is becoming very dangerous. A constructive approach to the problem would require dealing with its fundamental causes, but that’s off the agenda, because we must continue with a social policy that’s aimed at strengthening the welfare state for the rich. The only kind of responses the government can resort to under those conditions is pandering to the fear of crime with increasing harshness, attacking civil liberties and attempting to control the poor, essentially by force.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“Αλλά δεν μπορείς να αλλάξεις τα πράγματα αν δεν αρχίσεις, τουλάχιστον, να τα κατανοείς.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“the word profits. Profits don’t exist anymore—just jobs. So when Clinton came back from Indonesia with a $40-billion contract for Exxon, the media all talked about jobs for Amer - icans. But profits for Exxon? Perish the thought.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“No heights of cynicism trouble the equanimity of Western moralists.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“It’s all quite predictable, as study after study shows. A brutal tyrant crosses the line from admirable friend to “villain” and “scum” when he commits the crime of independence. One common mistake is to go beyond robbing the poor—which is just fine—and to start interfering with the privileged, eliciting opposition from business leaders.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works

“I should also say that the policy issues that have to be faced are quite deep. It’s always nice to have reforms. It would be nice to have more money for starving children. But there are some objective problems which you and I would have to face if we ran the country.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works