“The one fact that shocked me was that Noam Chomsky had searched mainstream U.S. media for 22 years for a single reference to American aggression in South Vietnam, and had found none. (…) I’m still taken aback at the extent of indoctrination and propaganda in the United States. It is as if people there are being reared in a sort of altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen. (…) Reading Chomsky gave me an idea of how unfree the free world is, really. How uninformed. How indoctrinated.
There was a poignant moment in an old interview by Chomsky when he talked about being a 15 year old boy when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He said that there wasn’t a single person with whom he could share his outrage. And that struck me as a most extreme form of loneliness. It was a loneliness which evidently nurtured a mind that was not willing to align itself with any ideology.”
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“If you look at the logic underlaying an act of terrorism and the logic underlaying a retaliatory war against terrorism, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary people pay for the actions of their governments. Osama Bin Laden is making people pay for the actions of the U.S. State, whether it’s in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, or Afghanistan. The U.S. government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same.
Osama Bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush, with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Osama Bin Laden with Al Qaeda. The difference is that nobody elected Bin Laden. Bush was elected (in a manner of speaking), so U.S. citizens are more responsible for his actions than Iraqis are for the actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghan for the Taliban. And yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have been killed, either by economic sanctions or cruise missiles, and we’re told that this deaths are the result of “just wars” If there is such a thing as a just war, who is to decide what is just and what is not? Whose God is going to decide that?
— ARUNDHATI ROY, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile. South End Press, 2004. Pg. 60.
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Art by Shepard Fairey
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[youtube id=http://youtu.be/_JEvxOdMWOU]
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Democracy’s Endgame?
M.I.T., 2010 – Noam Chomsky, Arundathi Roy and Amy Goodman
[youtube id=http://youtu.be/zyIIRrAKfmM?t=2m8s]
Publicado em: 07/06/14
De autoria: casadevidro247
A Casa de Vidro Ponto de Cultura e Centro de Mídia