Why We Do What We Do; “breaking through the media and general doctrinal barriers”

by Scott Creighton

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky lays out why it is we do what we do. It’s a good interview. He also says he expects Israel will do something underhanded in the Gulf in order to provoke a war with Iran (good article at Washington’s blog on this subject) but that they don’t want to be seen casting the first blow because Israel is afraid of being considered a pariah state here in America as it is in the rest of the world.

This is a small section of the interview which can be found at Counterpunch.

LEZAMA: Just abide to the two state solution, and the conflict is eliminated? What about the idea that Gaza and the West Bank be contiguous?

CHOMSKY: That’s required!

LEZAMA: Right.

CHOMSKY: That is part of the Oslo agreement. The Oslo agreement stipulates explicitly that the West Bank and Gaza strip are a single territory. Ever since they signed the Oslo agreement, the United States and Israel have been dedicated to undermining them. The U.S. can violate law freely but it is never reported. Everybody else is too weak to do anything about it. The U.S. is just a rogue state.

LEZAMA: What should people in the U.S. be doing in response?

CHOMSKY: They should be breaking through the media and general doctrinal barriers to come to know what is going on. They should be helping people learn about this. I don’t have any secret sources of information. Everything I have said is public knowledge, but it is not known by anyone. The problem is self-censorship; the media just don’t report anything about it, and rarely do. There is just a tremendous amount of propaganda and indoctrination so people don’t know what is going on. This is not the only case, but it is an important one. Everything I have just mentioned is straight on the public record. What activists ought to be doing is place this in the public’s attention.

Chomsky on Ron Paul’s Libertarian Policies: “This is Just Savagery”… “a Call for Corporate Tyranny”

This is what happens when a Paulbot runs over to a liberal event hoping to get some dissatisfied democrats on board the “Revolution” Express. He gets a dose of reality.

Ron Paul is anything but an anti-establishment candidate. If corporatism is the problem then Ron Paul and his neoliberal libertarian agenda is nothing more than a concerted effort to make young naive voters beggars to their own demise.

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Noam Chomsky – The Myth of the Liberal Media

by Scott Creighton

This is a must watch film, not so much for what it says about the filtering mechanisms of the corporate media, the readers here certainly understand those and have understood those for years. But the real reason to watch this is to see how back in 1995, the Clinton administration was really pushing for the very neoliberal attacks we see taking place right now. In fact, for those out there who consider themselves libertarian and therefore outside the framing of the political insiders, it’s curious that the very arguments they level at us for promoting “liberty” be destroying the social safety net that keeps us “enslaved” was actually Clinton’s old propaganda and the far right’s propaganda from their combined attacks on social security, welfare, and Medicare.

I also should point out that the other day I criticized Kevin Zeese for suggesting Obama’s volunteerism program as the new path of action for the Occupy Wall Street movement when in fact, it’s worse than that. The “volunteerism” push actually dates back to 1997 and it was Bill Clinton’s solution for their attack on welfare. The idea being that they could attack welfare and then get people to volunteer to help people who start starving as a result of their aid being cut by the Clintons. Interestingly, Colin Powell also became a front man for this campaign. Beautiful huh? Zeese dusting off an old Bill Clinton/Colin Powell bit of propaganda and suggesting that as a direction for the OWS movement.

This film was made in 1997.

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Noam Chomsky at the Syracuse Peace Council May 11th 2011

Noam Chomsky: “The U.S. and Its Allies Will Do Anything to Prevent Democracy in the Arab World”

You have to look really hard to find a better understanding of the geo-political world today than that which Noam Chomsky offers.

“On the other hand, the Times wasn’t lying when they said that it led to the region’s stability. And the reason is because of the meaning of the word “stability” as a technical meaning. Stability is—it’s kind of like democracy. Stability means conformity to our interests. So, for example, when Iran tries to expand its influence in Afghanistan and Iraq, neighboring countries, that’s called “destabilizing.” It’s part of the threat of Iran. It’s destabilizing the region. On the other hand, when the U.S. invades those countries, occupies them, half destroys them, that’s to achieve stability. And that is very common, even to the point where it’s possible to write—former editor of Foreign Affairs—that when the U.S. overthrew the democratic government in Chile and instituted a vicious dictatorship, that was because the U.S. had to destabilize Chile to achieve stability. That’s in one sentence, and nobody noticed it, because that’s correct, if you understand the meaning of the word “stability.” Yeah, you overthrow a parliamentary government, you install a dictatorship, you invade a country and kill 20,000 people, you invade Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands of people—that’s all bringing about stability. Instability is when anyone gets in the way.”  Noam Chomsky

The transcript of this video is found here.

Meanwhile Alan Dershowitz literally throws a hissy-fit over Noam Chomsky’s op-ed piece called “My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death.”. Allan Mendenhall tears Dershowitz a new one as he reviews his latest Chomsky hit-piece for Counterpunch.

Remember, Chomsky has stated on many occasions that there is absolutely no valid evidence to support holding bin Laden responsible for the events of 9/11 and in fact, the relevant evidence shows he was not responsible for 9/11 at all.

This of course infuriates globalist warmonger cheerleaders like Alan Dershowitz and really leaves one wondering who the real “terrorists” are in the first place.

Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky

Chris Hedges on the rise of the corporate class

Conversation with Chris Hedges

Noam Chomsky: The Conscience of America

Noam Chomsky on Newsnight BBC

Fake Democracy – Noam Chomsky

Forgetting Francisco Lotero: Noam Chomsky Peddles End of Humanity Fear-Mongering for the IMF and Big Oil

by Scott Creighton

“Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology, it is the word maladjusted. Maladjusted. I would like to say to you today that there are some things in our society, some things in our world,  for which I am proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized.” Martin Luther King.

Its the end of the humanity as we know it folks. Its the end of humanity because for the next two years the republicans will control one of our two houses of congress, the least powerful one at that, the House of Representatives.  At least, that is what Noam Chomsky has said.

Forget the fact that they only hold office for 2 years. Forget about the fact that the republicans in the House just repealed the corporatist ObamaCare bill which, according to Dennis Kucinich (before his great “transformation”) is actually worse than doing nothing on health care.. forget that it was a largely symbolic gesture since the corporatist democrats will kill the effort in the senate. Forget the fact that Obama is rushing as fast as he can in infuse as many bankers and corporate CEOs into the inner workings of his administration. Forget the fact that Obama now claims the right to kill U.S. citizens just because he wants to with no due process of law. Forget the fact that Hilary Clinton is running around trying to pick new wars with any nation she can in service to the MIC and the bankers.

Forget all of that.

Its the end of humanity as we know it folks. This is the message that Noam Chomsky delivered to us through a recent Nation magazine interview on the subjects of climate change and peak oil, of all things. Republicans… climate change… and peak oil. Fear mongering taken to an all new level. Somewhere little Francisco Lotero rolls in his grave.

Noam Chomsky: Breaking the Israel-Palestine Deadlock

by Noam Chomsky from Information Clearinghouse

While intensively engaged in illegal settlement expansion, the government of Israel is also seeking to deal with two problems: a global campaign of what it perceives as “delegitimation” – that is, objections to its crimes and withdrawal of participation in them – and a parallel campaign of legitimation of Palestine.

The “delegitimation,” which is progressing rapidly, was carried forward in December by a Human Rights Watch call on the U.S. “to suspend financing to Israel in an amount equivalent to the costs of Israel’s spending in support of settlements,” and to monitor contributions to Israel from tax-exempt U.S. organizations that violate international law, “including prohibitions against discrimination” – which would cast a wide net. Amnesty International had already called for an arms embargo on Israel. The legitimation process also took a long step forward in December, when Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil recognized the State of Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), bringing the number of supporting nations to more than 100.

Noam Chomsky on Taming the Bewildered Herd

(The “crisis of democracy” in the 1960s gave birth to the Lewis Powell memo of 1971 which served as a blueprint for how they needed to retake control of America, and by that I mean the corporate and banking elites and the special class of their servants in politics and the media. From that was born the “think tanks” and the Libertarian Party and basically the need to instill the neoliberal ideology that would later permeate our society’s “special class, ie. the “Washington Consensus” )

Noam talks about how Walter Lippman defined modern “democracy” – “you need something to tame the bewildered herd (so they don’t cause trouble) and that is public relations or manufactured consent…. the media, the schools, the popular culture has to divide for the political class… it has to instill the proper beliefs.”

“and if the specialized class (politicians like Ron Paul, Clintons, Bush, Obama, ect. and media figures like Wolf Blitzer, Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, ect.) can come along and say “I will serve your interests” (to the elites) then they will be allowed to be part of that group…. that means they have to have instilled in them the beliefs and the doctrines that will serve the interests of private power. Unless they can master that skill they are not part of the specialized class.”

Part 1

“State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes, and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and by many others and it has been pursued to this day…. the Business community learned alot from the successes of the Creel Commission and creating the Red Scare and its aftermath and in fact the public relations industry underwent a huge expansion at that time” Noam Chomsky

The Vietnam Syndrome – the “sickly inhibitions against the use of military force”

Chomsky: No Evidence That Al Qaeda or bin Laden Carried Out 9/11 Attack

by Scott Creighton

I have written several times in the past that I thought Noam Chomsky was more of a Truth advocate than he really let on. I suggested people read his 2006 book Failed States and kind of read “between the lines” to get the real message that he was trying to leave his readers with.  Several readers took exception with that theory of mine (the list is growing longer by the day) preferring to recite the status quo Truth movement opinion of Mr. Chomsky, that he was “limited hangout” at best, and/or something else altogether.

I have even pointed out comments made by Chomsky in public that would tend to make him at least appear to be moving to our side; statements like “the supposed hijackers of 911 were never accurately identified by the US and they still haven’t been” and “the US doesn’t want to put “terror” suspects on trial in civilian courts because they have no evidence” these statements were made on Democracy Now back in March of 2010 yet pretty much went unnoticed by the majority of the Truth movement.

A few days ago some news came out that makes my position a little easier to swallow for my fellow Truth advocates, or at least, it should. This has shaken up the Truth movement a bit and they have been chatting about it on Blogger for quite sometime now.

Renowned Jewish-American scholar Noam Chomsky says US invasion of Afghanistan was illegal since to date there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Justice for Fallujah Fundraiser: Noam Chomsky

The Justice For Fallujah Project Fundraiser, 9/16/2010
Paulist Center, Boston, MA
http://www.thefallujahproject.org

Recorded and edited by
Charngchi Way
Additional audio by
Jason Pramas

(The coup of 1958 by Abd al Karim Qassim terrified the British and U.S. monied interests… quoted at the time as saying “… Qassim might attempt to redistribute wealth in an attempt to build a strong, democratic Iraq that could help free other Arabs and afro-Asians. He might, they feared, even adopt Nassir’s plan to use Saudi resources to improve living standards for Arabs everywhere.”  “Eisenhower declared this was a Kremlin plot to undermine the West… so anyway, the Iraqi coup, was a “dangerous virus” in diplomatic literature, and it had to be quickly illiminated, and it was illiminated. John F. Kennedy, who was a speciallist in murderous military coups, which instituted vicious brutal dictatorships, carried out one with the help of the British in Iraq in 1963, CIA organized a coup and did throw out the government, ended these threats, the CIA distributed the Baath Party as the ones who executed it, and (the CIA) distributed lists of leftists who should be assasinated, there were lots of killings, they also went beyond, killed all sorts of professionals, teachers and so on…”)

Part 1

“Sheer Criminal Aggression” Israel’s Attack on Gaza Flotilla Chomsky Says “No Credible Pretext”

American Radical – The Trials of Norman Finkelstein

“A famous English aristocrat once said that if a person were to walk down the streets of London telling the truth to people he met, he would probably be killed before he went a couple hundred meters.” Noam Chomsky

Part 1

“This past week one of Israel’s main television networks broadcast the documentary AMERICAN RADICAL three times. An old Israeli friend wrote to ask whether it had been shown in the U.S. I had to smile.” Norman Finkelstein 

Norman Finkelstein: Israel being exposed and feels threatened

“The Evil Scourge of Terrorism”: Reality, Construction, Remedy

(In this article dated just yesterday, Chomsky talks about “the evil scourge of terrorism“… that’s the evil scourge of our state sponsored terrorism.  He addresses several examples dating back to Robert Kennedy bringing “the terrorists of the world” to Cuba to try to overthrow Castro up to the Reagan “war on terror”, which was pretty much just a way to use terrorism to compel nations to do as we wished. Chomsky calls it a “return to barbarism in our time”.  “Reagan was the first modern president to employ the audacious device of concealing his resort to “the evil scourge of terrorism” under the cloak of a “war on terror.”” Chomsky goes on to expose how terrorist have been enshrined in our national self-image… “ At Stanford University’s prestigious Hoover Institution Reagan is revered as a colossus whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.” We arrive by plane in Washington at Reagan international airport – or if we prefer, at John Foster Dulles international airport, honoring another prominent terrorist commander, whose exploits include overthrowing Iranian and Guatemalan democracy, installing the terror and torture state of the Shah and the most vicious of the terrorist states of Central America.”… This is an important article because in it, Chomsky is flirting with saying something entirely different from he has in the past…

“The attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 is called “the good war,” no questions asked, a justifiable act of self-defense with the noble aim of protecting human rights from the evil Tali-ban. There are a few problems with that near-universal contention. For one thing, the goal was not to remove the Taliban. Rather, Bush informed the people of Afghanistan that they would be bombed unless the Taliban turned bin Laden over to the US, as they might have done, had the US agreed to their request to provide some evidence of his responsibility for 9/11. The request was dismissed with contempt, for good reasons. As the head of the FBI conceded 8 months later, after the most intensive international investigation in history they still had no evidence, and certainly had none the preceding October. The most he could say is that the FBI “believed” that the plot had been hatched in Afghanistan and had been implemented in the Gulf Emirates and Germany.

 Three weeks after the bombing began, war aims shifted to overthrow of the regime. British Admiral Sir Michael Boyce announced that the bombing would continue until “the people of the country…get the leadership changed” – a textbook case of international terrorism.”

…”In cases like these, the only rational conclusion is that the declared goals are not the real ones, and that if we want to learn about the real goals, we should adopt an approach that is familiar in the law: relying on predictable outcome as evidence for intent. I think the approach leads to quite plausible conclusions, for the “war on drugs,” the “war on terror,” and much else. That, however, is work for another day.” Chomsky)

by Noam Chomsky, the Erich Fromme Lecture, Information Clearinghouse

The president could not have been more justified when he condemned “the evil scourge of terrorism.” I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time,” to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration. When George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” 20 years later, he was re-declaring the war, an important fact that is worth exhuming from Orwell’s memory hole if we hope to understand the nature of the evil scourge of terrorism, or more importantly, if we hope to understand ourselves. We do not need the famous Delphi inscription to recognize that there can be no more important task. Just as a personal aside, that critical necessity was forcefully brought home to me almost 70 years ago in my first encounter with Erich Fromm’s work, in his classic essay on the escape to freedom in the modern world, and the grim paths that the modern free individual was tempted to choose in the effort to escape the loneliness and anguish that accompanied the newly-discovered freedom – matters all too pertinent today, unfortunately.