Dr. Arendt takes rather an absolutist view, that I don’t share, about certain historical phenomena such as the character of the new societies that ha… - Noam Chomsky

I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. [...] There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster'; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.

The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

وفي هذه اللحظة تقوم واشنطن بتعليم العالم درسًا بالغ القبح والخطورة: إذا كنت تريد أن تدافع عن نفسك في مواجهتنا، فالأفضل لك أن تحاكي كوريا الشمالية، بحيث تمثل خطرًا عسكريًا ذا مصداقية يتهددنا. ___ مداخلات