Vatnik Soup
Soup number181
Date18.05.2023
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Noam Chomsky

In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American author and academic, Noam Chomsky. He’s best-known for his long history as a political commentator and left-wing activist, and for his staunch criticism of the US foreign policy since the 1960s.

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Chomsky’s antiwar activism started around 1962, when he was protesting against the US involvement in the Vietnam War. He started writing essays and eventually books, targeted mostly to the American “New Left” movement. His criticism towards US interventionism continued...

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...during the 70s and the 80s, resisting US involvement in conflicts like Nicaraguan Contra War and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Since then, everything he does or says is shrouded with rabid anti-Americanism. He seems to consider the US as the “root of all evil”, ...

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...regardless of their involvement and role. He is the ultimate epitome of a “whataboutist”, and there simply is no discussion which he can’t turn into US bashing.

In 1988 he co-authored his best-known book, Manufacturing Consent. It outlines a propaganda model for...

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...understanding how the mainstream media manipulates people. He argued that the mass media in the US are “ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function”.

In 2011 he told the journalist George Monbiot that calling Srebrenica Massacre a...
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...genocide “cheapens the word”. He also denied a report by Ed Vulliamy on the existence of Bosnian concentration camps, stating that Vulliamy “got caught up in a story that probably wasn’t true”. But it wasn’t the first genocide Chomsky had denied. He also criticized...

6/25 ImageImageImage ...the Cambodian genocide, a systematic persecution and killing of Cambodian citizens by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 70s. It resulted in the deaths of 1, 5-2 million people. Chomsky insisted that the testimonies from refugees can’t be used as evidence because they’re ...

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..."frightened and defenseless" and “at the mercy of alien force.” But remember, USA bad.

When it comes to Ukraine, Chomsky has stripped the country from all kinds of agency and sovereignty. He’s said that “Ukraine is not a free actor; they’re dependent on what the US...

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...determines, " and that the US is only using Ukraine to weaken Russia. In an interview with Jeremy Scahill, Chomsky claimed that “Crimea is off the table. We may not like it. Crimeans apparently do like it, ” suggesting that the Crimeans want to be part of Russia.
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The annexation was a direct violation of the Budapest memorandum & violated the international law. “Crimeans” are hardly a cohesive group of people & the referendum in 2014 was declared invalid by the UN. The majority of Crimean population supported joining Ukraine in 1991.
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Chomsky has referred to the 2014 Revolution of Dignity as a coup with “direct US involvement”, suggesting that Ukraine had no agency to overthrow its corrupt leaders who were planning to do the same as Lukashenko had did in Belarus.

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He’s also said that the “US policy” is now to fight to the “last Ukrainian”, giving Putin no other choices than “suicide” or nuclear war. And then of course there’s the evil NATO expansion, that has cornered Russia and left them with no other option than to abduct...

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..children & rape women in Ukraine.Countries have joined NATO only to defend themselves from Russia’s imperialism. This has saved the Baltic states, and it could’ve saved Georgia and Ukraine, too. And again, if we go by verbal agreements instead of actual signed treaties, ..
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Putin should return Crimea to Ukraine no later than today. Chomsky has also stated that Putin’s goals in Ukraine are its “demilitarization” and “neutralization”. By Putin’s words, their goal was actually to “denazify” Ukraine, and the plan is based on Putin’s article ...

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..."On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians", in which Putin claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” and share the “same destiny”. Kremlin-controlled RIA Novosti published even more radical op-ed by Timofey Sergeytsev, who called for the full...

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destruction of Ukraine as a state and also its national identity. In the same interview, published in April 2023, Noam also claimed that “Russia is acting with restraint and moderation”, continuing that “it’s obvious” that Russia is fighting more humanely than the US did.

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So far the estimates of children abducted from Ukraine to Russia range from 19 000 to over 300 000, and there have been reports of torture, castrations, massacres and rapes, conducted by the Russian troops, all around Ukraine.

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He’s said that Finland and Sweden applying for NATO had “nothing to do with fear of a Russian attack, which has never been even conceived”, and that Russia threatening either country amount to “Western propaganda”. He reasoned that these applications were made so that ...

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...both countries could access “great new market opportunities [and] new access to advanced equipment”. Chomsky’s main argument is that Ukraine and the West should de-escalate and appease Russia because of the constant nuclear threat. But as I’ve written before, this...

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... would just make the nuclear blackmail a viable strategy for further domination by any country that has a nuclear arsenal.

In an interview by Russell Brand, Noam’s claimed that Americans have actually less freedom than the Soviets in the 70s. Why even compare today’s..

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US to 70’s USSR? In Putin’s Russia, dissidents, opposition politicians and activists are hunted down and put in prison or murdered. Roskomnadzor censors thousands and thousands of websites that go against the Kremlin line. It has extremely strict “foreign agent laws”, and...21/25 Image
..in March 2023, the Russian authorities detained WSJ journalist Evan Gershkovich, blaming him for “espionage”.

Lately Chomsky has been under scrutiny for his businesses with now-dead American sex offender & financier, Jeffrey Epstein. WSJ reported that Epstein’s calendar..
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..included a flight and dinner with Chomsky in 2015, and that Epstein moved 270 000 USD for Chomsky in Mar 2018.
I want to conclude with something Chomsky wrote in 1970, found by @idvck: “As long as an American army of occupation remains in Vietnam, the war will continue, ”..23/25 Image
...Chomsky wrote. “Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place. Those who had been calling for ’negotiations now’ were deluding themselves and others.”
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Now, switch “American” to “Russian” and “Vietnam” to “Ukraine”, and we have ourselves a solution to the war in Ukraine.

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