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Noam Chomsky Quotes About Aggression

• There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them

  Noam Chomsky

  Rights, Issues, Abuse

  
  

• Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mean, People, Common Sense

  "The Way We Live Now: 11-02-03: Questions For Noam Chomsky; The Professorial Provocateur". Interview with Deborah Solomon, www.nytimes.com. November 2, 2003. 

  
  

• If you and I go into a store to rob it, and I say "shoot," that's not protected. Like all judicial decisions and legislation, this leaves plenty of gray areas, including many of great significance that are rarely discussed: advocacy of imminent war crimes, such as aggression, for example. I think we would all agree that such speech should be protected, despite the often horrific consequences, but it's worth noting that that stretches the doctrine to its limits.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Thinking, Decision

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com 

  
  

• To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.

  Noam Chomsky

  Decision, Important, Technique

  Institute Professor Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky (2010). “American Power and the New Mandarins”, p.493, ReadHowYouWant.com

• In fact, various lawyers' groups - to some extent in the U.S. but mostly in England and Canada and elsewhere - are bringing demands for a war crimes trial for the crime of aggression. However, though the invasion of Iraq was plainly an act of aggression, it doesn't break any records.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Iraq, Invasion

  Source: progressive.org 

  
  

• What was the invasion of South Vietnam, for example, in 1962, when Kennedy sent the Air Force to bomb South Vietnam and start chemical warfare? That's aggression.

  Noam Chomsky

  Air, Invasion, Example

  Source: progressive.org 

  
  

• Whenever there is injustice, oppression, aggression, violence, it's standard for it to be supported by those we now call "intellectuals," but typically not by all; there is typically a fringe of dissidents. With very rare exceptions - in fact, it's hard to think of any - they suffer in one or another way; how depends on the nature of the society.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Suffering, Way

  Source: chomsky.info 

  
  

• Every book that comes out, every article that comes out, talks about how - while it may have been a "mistake" or an "unwise effort" - the United States was defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. And they portray those who opposed the war as apologists for North Vietnam. That's standard to say. The purpose is obvious: to obscure the fact that the United States did attack South Vietnam and the major war was fought against South Vietnam.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Mistake, Book

  Source: chomsky.info 

  
  

• When people denounced [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of. Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little, that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning in 1965.

  Noam Chomsky

  Zero, War, Rights

  Source: www.truth-out.org 

  
  

• My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.

  Noam Chomsky

  Agency, Feelings, Essentials

  
  

Establishing a client state in Iraq would significantly enhance that strategic power, a matter of great significance for the future. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, it would provide the US with "critical leverage" of its European and Asian rivals, a conception with roots in early post-war planning. These are substantial reasons for aggression - not unlike those of the British when they invaded and occupied Iraq over 80 years earlier, at the dawn of the oil age.

Noam Chomsky

Age, Planning, Reason

Source: www.washingtonpost.com