Noam Chomsky Quotes About Security
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U.S. international and security policy . . . has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call "the Fifth Freedom," understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.
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China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.
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There are by now declassified documents from the 1950s that tells you a lot about what's going on in Egypt and we should have known it then. It's about exactly what's happening, how we can disregard public opinion as long as the dictators we support are capable of suppressing their populations. So to hell with public opinion. That's all right there in the 1950's. That's not security. That's not security of the government. That's, if anything, security from its own population. And there's a lot of that.
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Michael Flynn, national security adviser, [his reaction] to the Iranian missile test the other day was very frightening. Now the missile test is ill-advised, they shouldn't have done it. But it's not in violation of international law or international agreements. They shouldn't have done it. His reaction suggested maybe we're going to go to war in retaliation.
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I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.
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For fifty years, we heard NATO is necessary to save Western Europe from the Russian hordes, you know the slave state, stuff I was taking about. In 1990-91, no Russian hordes. Okay, what happens? Well there are actually visions of the future system that were presented. One was [Mikhail] Gorbachev. He called for a Eurasian security system, with no military blocs. He called it a Common European Home. No military blocs, no Warsaw Pact. Just an integrated security system with no conflicts.Now the other vision was presented by George Bush, this is the "statesman".
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There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office - anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.
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I've spent a lot of time working on declassified documents - and they do get declassified after decades - you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It's mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.
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With regard to nuclear weapons, it's kind of hard to say. [Donald Trump] is said lots of things. The national security experts are terrified. But they're more terrified by his personality than by his statements.
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The attack on Social Security is similarly motivated. Social Security is based on the conception is that we should have sympathy for others, not function merely as isolated "rational wealth maximizers."
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It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.
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The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.
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North Korea and China have proposed what sounds like a pretty sensible option that North Korea should end its development of nuclear weapons, the US should stop carrying out hostile military maneuvers on the North Korean border. The US immediately rejected it. Modernization program is a very clear example of how security doesn't matter. There is no gain in security but massive overkill of the adversary's deterrent capacity. The only consequence of it is to elicit the likelihood of a preemptive attack. And a preemptive attack leads to a nuclear winter world.
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Actually, the phrase "national security" is barely used until the 1930s. And there's a reason. By then, the United States was beginning to become global. Before that the United States had been mostly a regional power - Britain was the biggest global power. After the Second World War, national security is everywhere, because we basically owned the world, so our security is threatened everywhere. Not just on our borders, but everywhere - so you have to have a thousand military bases around the world for "defense."
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The people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace.
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Internal security means something. It means war against your own population.
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There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security.
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The communists basically acted as the police force of the security system of the [Spain] Republic and were very much opposed to the anarchists, partially because [Joseph] Stalin still hoped at that time to have some kind of pact with Western countries against [Adolf] Hitler. That, of course, failed and Stalin withdrew the support to the Republic. They even withdrew the Spanish gold reserves.
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The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. . . . This was a horrendous crime . . . The primary victims . . . were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians . . . It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom.
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Maybe [the Republicans] 'll find ways around it, but the financial system of the world depends very heavily on the credibility of the US Treasury Department. US Treasury securities are what's called "good as gold"; they're the basis of international finance, and if the government can't uphold them, if they become valueless, the effect on the international financial system could be quite severe. But in order to destroy a limited health-care law, the right-wing Republicans, the reactionary Republicans, are willing to do that.
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