Noam Chomsky Quotes
Reparations - not just aid - should be provided by those responsible for devastating Iraqi civilian society by cruel sanctions and military actions, and - together with other criminal states - for supporting Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities and beyond. That is the minimum that honesty requires.
Chomsky, Noam. Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
The Congresswoman was referring to the fact that the U. S. Defense Department had trained Indonesian military officers who had leadership roles in the massacres and other human rights violations in East Timor in 1999.
Yet we continued to give the government aid.
South Africa, with the fall of apartheid, instead of arresting, trying, and sentencing the worst of the old regime, elected a truth commission approach instead.
Abu Ghraib was the prison in Iraq where prisoners were brutalized and treated illegally and immorally. Seymour Hirsh was the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who broke the story. Levy contrasted that where the Algerian War was full of such atrocities but French intellectuals and press would not publicize it. It didn’t stop for the whole war.
Turkey, under the control of the triumvirate of the 3 Young Turks had massacred almost all of the Armenian population in the area claimed by Turkey. At the end of WWI, there were many demands that those who ordered the policy of a Turkish genocide and those who carried it out by brought to justice—tried and punished. The Sultan had done little if anything to stop the slaughters although he was very weak, Turkey under the Young Turks had also picked the wrong side and allied with the Germans. The Sultan and his Grand Vizier were trying to pick up the pieces and maintain the Ottoman Empire as best they could despite they the fact that they lost control of much of their vast territory. At the Paris Peace Conference, the Grand Vizier virtually admitted the crimes and committed the Turkish government to determining the guilty and bringing them to justice. He actually had 50 of the worst offenders arrested (See {620595}.). However, there were a few tried and one governor of a province was hanged and a few others received short jail sentences. Talaat, the worst of The Young Turks regarding the genocide, escaped to Germany. But he was tracked by a surviving Armenian who assassinated Talaat. The assassin was acquitted by a sympathetic German court which ruled that the extermination of the assassin’s family had been so traumatic that temporary insanity relieved the assassin of criminal responsibility.
This statement was made before the 2012 Syrian Revolution.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
