Does Anyone Listen To Noam Chomsky

Is anyone else's youtube interface totally screwed up?

 

Can't tell you I generally avoid utube like the plague.

 

Heh? I find his work to be incredibly accessible and easy to understand. There's very little jargon or complicated language of any sort, I've been reading him since I was 15, when my vocabulary was still in its infancy.

 

If aggression for the sake of economic gain isn't imperialism, I'd love to hear your definition of the word.

America has pioneered a new kind of imperialism: "nation building." Just because it's not the imperialism we'd seen with the Empires of Old doesn't mean it's not the same thing, it just utilises a different playbook. The goal- and much of the process- is the same.

 

Oh you mean as opposed to what the Soviets did?

 

what is this i don't even

 

That would be because your knowledge is history is distorted and truncated.

 

I simply do not understand why you're bringing up the soviet union.

 

Please point out where there was aggression for economic gain. Libs keep blaming Bush for invading Iraq because of their oil. Show me where we took any of their oil.

 

LOL, you can't make this stuff up.

 

Read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," by John Perkins. The resources are stolen legally, through debt and "aid" programs.

 

That's your defense? "Tu quoque"?

 

Does anybody listen to Noam Chomsky?

Not if they have any sense.

 

How about basically any of the military engagements America has been involved in, both indirectly an directly? Iraq wasn't the only conflict since Vietnam, it's just the largest scale and the most poorly managed. Honduras, Nicaragua and several other South American states, if you'd actually read the thread you'd know the world court condemned the US for their involvement in the latter for involvement in terrorism. The support of numerous juntas and other dictatorships throughout recent history springs to mind.

You'd also be hard pressed to say the war was to find WMDs. Basically, Sadam's generals told him that they had these weapons programs, the British intelligence services found some proof of this occurring, and used that as justification for the war. Surely with all the resources at the disposal of the Five-Eye States (America, Australia etc.) they could have verified this claim before going to war? Surely there was an ulterior motive?

 

I wish people would stop beating their party drums for a second. Not against you, but the people who drag the thread into that lib-conservative foodfight.

But, I think everyone tends to fumble on their solutions about how to fix the problem, because those questions are difficult to answer and rarely meet everyone's vision of approval, so I can excuse Chomsky if he is less than stellar on that. Apparently, everyone else is also. However, I think he points out a lot of the problems with clarity...in most cases. In some, I felt his answers were kind of on auto-respond, but that might be from speaking for years and years on the subject.

You must be joking. Nicaragua, for one. Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Hawaii,...you might as well say the Western Hemisphere, except, perhaps, for Canada, and I'd only be stating half the situation.

 

The people who initially replaced Samoza were as bad if not worse than Samoza. The biggest mistake of the cold war was that we never found a middle ground between right wing thugs and the left wing thugs that the Soviets tried to replace them with. Nor were we always acurate in the identification of our opponents in these conflicts. In almost all case we were reponding to what we believed to be Soviet expansionism. And in the overwhelming majority of cases we were correct in that assessment. One can find arguement with our methods on occassion but not our reason for being thier in the first place unless of course one believes that the Soviet system was somehow betrter than what was already there which in most cases in terms of wholesale slaughter and displacement of local populations it was infinitely worse.

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The people who initially replaced Samoza were as bad if not worse than Samoza. The biggest mistake of the cold war was that we never found a middle ground between right wing thugs and the left wing thugs that the Soviets tried to replace them with. Nor were we always acurate in the identification of our opponents in these conflicts. In almost all case we were reponding to what we believed to be Soviet expansionism. And in the overwhelming majority of cases we were correct in that assessment. One can find arguement with our methods on occassion but not our reason for being thier in the first place unless of course one believes that the Soviet system was somehow betrter than what was already there which in most cases in terms of wholesale slaughter and displacement of local populations it was infinitely worse.

 

Unfortunately, one can argue that in the pursuit of anti-communist/anti-Soviet agenda's, the US, itself, contributed to mass murder and population displacement in countries in the America's as well as Asia. Sometimes they did this directly, and sometimes they acted through the dictators they set up. Validation of American innocence or plausibility in this conflict requires a Good/Evil view of the world, rather then the more practical view that both sides were two powers fighting for more power. World Power, to be precise.

 

I like Chomsky but i never saw him as great enough to be a real Communist .
Of course nobody has the perfect idea about anything , humans have flaws and so did our thinking processes .

On the imperialism field using airplanes with red cross symbols to fly commandos into El Salvador is not exactly legal.

 

Where did we support these numerous dictators? In Nicauragua we supported the Contras, i.e. the good guys--not the Sandanistas or Noriega. Again, where did we get invoved for economic gain reasons, and if you come up with something, please tell us what exactly was that economic gain---was it oil or what? My point here is that we never go into these nations having an economic gain in mind, rather its to oust the bad guys, period! If there is economic gain in the form of a Halliburton (American jobs) for instance--the upshot to it still remains to bring a democracy to said nation while ousting the bad guys. This shouldn't be that difficult to digest.

 

All over the world? Sadam Hussein for a period of time, that one certainly springs to mind. The Indonesian government during the 1970s, and the Iranian Shah (operation Ajax). Those three are just off the top of my head, there are literally too many to list. Infact, those three are actually common knowledge amongst the politically literate. It's no secret that the west supports dictators and secures resources by undermining democracy, destroying civilian infrastructure forcing countries to rely on World Bank loans to rebuild, the conditions of which are trade liberalisation, creating favourable terms for western financial institutions.

If by "supported the contras" you mean attacked and weakened civilian infrastructure- ie, killed countless innocent people to make it easier for them to undermine the current power structure, then I don't know how you can call the contras- or their American backers- the "good guys." Nicaraguans currently live in abject poverty.

It's complex, but for simplicities sake let's just say trade liberalisation. The economy is quite accommodating regarding the west but serves absolutely no function as far as Nicaraguans are concerned.

And yet America has no role in determining who is a "bad guy" and who isn't, there is no Pax Columbia. It's up to the international community, in accordance with clearly established laws, to decide who is in the right and who isn't, not America unilaterally. In fact, working within that script, America frequently assumes the role of the "bad guy" like in their support for Israel and continued blocking of any resolution that would force a solution. It's basically standard fare for America to obstruct the international community's humanitarian agenda. One need look no further for an example than Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, America and co. sold Indonesia the weapons, then blocked any attempt at international condemnation (sanctions etc.) while the Timorese oil was split between American allies in the theatre, namely Australia (hi!) and Indonesia.

And yet the US and other western powers frequently undermine- if not outright demolish- democracy on the international stage by backing autocratic regimes and ousting democratic governments, the aforementioned Operation Ajax is probably the most brazen example that is common knowledge to most people.

 

Yeah...denying the khmer rouge reign ever happend is pure evil. Hes terrible and insane.

 

Eats babies, too, I heard.

 

Where did Chomsky ever do that? Can you provide a direct, verbatim, in-context quote to that effect? Or are you just lying?

 

Well, for someone like Chomsky who scrutinizes US foreign policy, Khmer Rouge would have been one of the things he might validate, it seems. The Khmer Rouge is awful, but it occurred due to the power vacuum left after US bombing and warfare devastated the country and tore it's original leadership. In fact, just like the Taliban, it was the destruction of country, infrastructure, and leadership that resulted in the people being swept into this extremist group, which led to genocide.

The Khmer Rouge killed millions, but the US also killed millions. The US, though, was the first tragedy that opened the door for the second.

 

Except that Chomsky did no such thing.