Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (2002) documentary film
Quotes 2000s, 2002
Context: If you take a poll among U. S. intellectuals, support for bombing Afghanistan is just overwhelming, but how many of them think that you should bomb Washington because of the U. S. war against Nicaragua, let's say, or Cuba or Turkey, or anyone else? Now if anyone were to suggest this, they'd be considered insane, but why? I mean, if one is right, why is the other wrong? When you try to get someone to talk about this question, they just won't try. They can't comprehend what your question is, because you can't comprehend that we should apply to ourselves the standards that you apply to others. That is incomprehensible! There couldn't be a moral principle more elementary... There's a famous definition in the Gospels of the hypocrite. The hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards that he applies to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called "war on terror" is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception. Can anybody understand that? No, can't understand that. But that's not so unusual... I know it was true in Germany and France and everywhere else. It's just standard. It's ugly, but it's standard.
“Let us turn now to the most elementary principle of just war theory, universality. Those who cannot accept this principle should have the decency to keep silent about matters of right and wrong, or just war. If we can rise to this level, some obvious questions arise: for example, have Cuba and Nicaragua been entitled to set off bombs in Washington, New York, and Miami in self-defense against ongoing terrorist attack? Particularly so when the perpetrators are well known and act with complete impunity, sometimes in brazen defiance of the highest international authorities, so that the cases are far clearer than Afghanistan? If not, why not?”
Hegemony or Survival, 2003.
Quotes 2000s, Hegemony or Survival (2003)
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Noam Chomsky 334
american linguist, philosopher and activist 1928Related quotes
Speeches, Moscow Address
Why War? (November 21, 1998) http://web.archive.org/web/20070324011124/http://www.natvan.com/pub/1998/112198.txt, American Dissident Voices Broadcast of November 21, 1998 http://archive.org/details/DrWilliamPierceAudioArchive308RadioBroadcasts
1990s, 1990
"How Terrorism's Victims Became Perpetrators" (April 2004) http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/soros26
A week before Iraq's parliamentary election https://www.irishtimes.com/news/abu-musab-al-zarqawi-in-quotes-1.786124 The Irish Times (23rd January 2005)
U.S. House of Representatives http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2002/cr090402.htm (September 4, 2002).
2000s, 2001-2005
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech about the Orlando Shooting (June 13, 2016)
Conclusion
1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)