The World Is One

[There] was just a study that came out from the Harvard Public Policy Institute, found that—pretty scary results, I thought. Less than—this is kids 18 to 24, you know, college students, basically. Less than half of them think that the government has a responsibility to deal with things like healthcare or food, and so on. When they say the government doesn’t have a responsibility, that’s kind of an interesting concept. If people thought they were living in a democracy, they would say—they would ask the question whether it’s a public responsibility. But again, the propaganda system is designed to make you feel that the government is some alien force, and it’s against you. You know, you want to keep it away from your affairs. In a democratic society, it would be quite different. Like, you can see it on April 15th. And a good measure of the extent to which a democratic system is functioning is how people feel about taxes. If you had a functioning democratic society, April 15th would be a day of celebration. It’s the day on which we get together and fund the policies that we’ve decided on and that we’ve gotten our representatives to approve of. It’s not what it is here. It’s a day of mourning, because this alien force is coming to steal things from you.

—Noam Chomsky (via theamericanbear)

(via breenizm)

Well, to learn about what the Cold War was about, the obvious place to look is what happened when it ended. So, November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union soon collapsed. So what did the United States do? How did it react? I mean, the pretext for everything that had happened in the past was, y’know, the Russian monster — “the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” attempting to take over the world, as John F Kennedy called it. Well, now the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy was gone, so what do we do? Well, it turns out what we do is exactly the same thing but with different pretexts. And that was made clear instantly. A couple of weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, the United States invaded Panama, killing unknown numbers of people. We don’t count our victims. According to Panamanian human rights groups, maybe a couple of thousand people, bombing the slum — the El Chorillo slum. The Panamanians take it seriously. In fact, last December they once again declared a national day of mourning referring to the invasion, but I don’t think it even made the newspapers here. I mean, when you crush ants in your path, you don’t pay much attention to what they may have to say about it. But they invaded Panama and had to veto some Security Council Resolutions. The point of the invasion was to kidnap a kind of a minor thug, Noriega, who was kidnapped, brought to the United States, tried, sentenced to a long sentence — sentenced for crimes that were real. But he had committed them when he was on the CIA payroll, almost without exception — a small footnote. But for that we had to invade Panama and kill however many people it was (a couple of thousand, probably) and install a government of bankers and narco-traffickers, and drug trafficking shot up, and so on. But it was a successful invasion and applauded here.

—Noam Chomsky, Modern-Day American Imperialism: Middle East and Beyond (via fyeahnoamchomsky)

(via noam-chomsky)