Noam Chomsky Quotes
The basic principle is that the losers have to confess, not the victors. When they do it, it's a crime. When we do it, it's not. And more generally, it's the defeated who are tried, not the victors.
Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. Edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002.
Rape has been used as a tool of war. Similarly here, rape has been used as the ultimate humiliation.
The Minister was commenting on a case where a 28 year old Punjab woman of low family status was sentenced by a Pakistani court to be gang raped in front of her father. The offence for which she was punished was that her younger brother age 11 had been found in the presence of a 20 year old daughter of a wealthy and high status family. The male members of the high status family beat and sodomized the young boy and then appealed to the tribal court for justice and defense of their family honor which the court granted by sentencing the daughter so the other family’s honor would be besmirched. The Pakistani national government, after outcries throughout the world, declared the punishment illegal. They named a school after the victim, Mukhtaran Bibi, and arrested the rapists. However the rapists were not charged with a capital crime according to Pakistan law and traditional Muslim law, Sharia.
Wilson and others after the American Revolution saw a dilemma. Then young would be attorneys were trained to revere the law and when regular students learned history and civics, the curriculum did not always emphasize that the older generation had engaged in rebellion, sedition, disloyalty to the government and armed revolution. However, they way their children were taught was to obey the law, be loyal to the government, and be good staid citizens. The dilemma has been with the nation ever since.
Holman is commenting on the Harvey Weinstein scandal in which he is accused of multiple sexual assaults over 30 or more years and the lack of liberal and progressive outrage and passive acceptance of his behavior by large circles of people who knew.
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.
