Noam Chomsky Quotes
The Soviet Union was pretty much what Lenin and Trotsky said it was.
Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. Edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002.
Vladimir Lenin. While Lenin was of this view, Stalin and other hard liners disagreed. They not only imposed their brand of communism on their own people via force with terrible consequences for any dissidents, but the Soviet Army imposed Communism on most of the states of Eastern Europe, and those states in turn used their Armies and secret police to impose it on their own citizens.
Ataturk was not receptive toward Communism as some other world leaders were at the time. He saw its weakness far earlier than many others.
Many foreign armies, including troops of the United States, had surrounded Russia. Most had no specific instructions or purpose but they all wanted to protect their interests from the chaotic Russian situation as well as from each other who might use the Russian weakness to establish their foothold.
Advocating a revolution against the Karenski provisional government: Vladimir Lenin
Lenin, Uritsky, and other Bolshevik leaders were attacked in 1918. Lenin was wounded but Utrtsky died, and this triggered the attacks on the other Russian factions by the Bolsheviks known as the “Red Terror.”
This quotation illustrates White’s favorable view of Russia. Note his use of the “it works” phrase which he picked up from Stefens’ famous quote {634892}. At the time the Soviet Union had been perceived by many economists to have been a great economic improvement over Czarist Russia. And over all, Russia which in 1917 was an economic basket case, had become one of the stronger states in Europe although the Russian people paid a horrendous price. Most historians agree that White passed classified information to the Russians. He was accused of being a Communist, but there was never any evidence of that. Some people believe that he was a spy for the Russians and committed espionage, but others disagree observing that White was very much his own man and felt that much information that was classified never should have been. White substituted his own judgment, it is believed, about what could be given to the Russians for the security system. He was an admirer of what Russian socialism had accomplished economically, educationally and medically since the 1917 revolution deposing the Czar. Russia had been a valuable military ally, which had taken the brunt of both military and civilian casualties in WWII. White’s economics were certainly not Marxist but very much Keynesian. He was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee where he was accused of being a Communist which he denied (see {634907}). He died of a heart attack 3 days later.
The reason that this quotation is important is that most Americans from the 1920s on concerned with Marxism and communism in the United States, conflated Marxism with Anarchists as if Marxists were anarchists who were bent on violence. In reality, to most Marxists, anarchists were more their enemy than the capitalists. Stalin was then only 28 years old and the Russian revolution was 9 years in the future.
Vladimir Lenin. This is a very important historical quotations. It was made by Lenin soon after the 1917 Russian Revolution and surprisingly to most he declared that the exporting of the Communist Revolution was more important than the national interest of communist Russia. Many Western nations, including the U. S. sent troops to part of Russia on various pretexts and it appeared to many that the West was ganging up against Russian Communism and interfering with their internal affairs. However, in effect, the new Russian state, with the attitude expressed by this quotation, was declaring a type of revolutionary war on all the capitalist nations who saw this fledgling mess of a country as a potential threat. They were right.
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.
