Noam Chomsky: The Ukraine War and Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis

On October 10, amidst Vladimar Putin's nuclear threats, the devastation of the Ukraine War, an the approaching 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Noam Chomsky shared his thinking with CPDCS and the International Peace Bureau.

[@babs420th9]

The world needs this man.

[@lorenzomcnally6629]

Like the world needs Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Lenin, Trotsky, IDI Amin, Nero, Ghengis Khan, Fidel Castro, Che Gueverra, Caesar Chavez, NICLAUS MADURO, Kim.Jong UN, Ho Chi MIHN, Pol Pot, Abdul Nassar, Mosedeq ( Iran) Salvador Allende, ANGOLA, YEMEN, Zimbabwe, the PRC and the USSR.

[@babs420th9]

Quoi? 🤷‍♀️

[@christakislouca1568]

Thank y 🍎🍏❤️

[@elizabethblakley2876]

Thanks so much for having Noam as a guest! Great questions!

[@benharriston2532]

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME

[@bunsw2070]

Is Gnome still trying to get the unvaccinated starved for refusing the experimental gene therapy?

[@OlafsonN]

Just found your channel because I’m a huge fan of Noam.👍

[@zsmith4853]

Exactly. I completely agree with absolutely everything you said.

[@annthomson5648]

Chomsky, always on point!

[@terjeoseberg990]

Chomsky is obviously confused.

[@shea086]

Yes, always on point despite his old age. More on point than Biden.

[@_PikluOfficial]

Red salute to Chomsky. He is a living legend. ✨

[@terjeoseberg990]

Red?

[@RoninTF2011]

Oh dear, another set of armchair activist arguing: let Ukrainaine die, so that we can have peace. The Neville Chamberlains of our time...disgusting.

[@lorenzomcnally6629]

Old Communists Die Hard. 93 years of hard core Revisionist Marxist history, cliches and platitudes. This guy is sickening reminder if how we ended up in WWII fighting GERMAN FASCISM ...because of the THREAT OF STALIN AND WORLD WIDE TOTALITARIAN MARXIST REVOLUTIONS.

[@elliotlambert3817]

The Ukraine war should not be viewed as a lesson. The USA is no student it is a selfish entity, that doe's what ever it pleases and never calculates cause and effect the USA has been doing similar things for all my 76 year life.

[@sahbab1]

if someone breaks into my house and kills my family I'm not going to sit down negotiate! Would you? Wouldn't you defend yourself and call the police? So why Chomsky and his friends are asking Ukraine to negotiate with the murderer? What kind of peace would that be? It's dishonest to ask Ukraine to give up its land for the sake of peace to a murderer who would then invade his other neighbours. Come on and be honest in your thinking.

[@willh1970]

Chomsky is reading too much Chomsky.

[@steelcom5976]

Chomsky has descended into something that he vilified others for in the past, living in a conceptual world. In his world the rogue state of Russia will honour an agreement, so he completely ignores the fact that Russia already has a non-aggression agreement with Ukraine, signed in 1994, called the Budapest Memorandum.

[@irvinhansen7173]

Chomsky highlights a solution where diplomacy is key. Why aren't humanitarian concerns emphasized over military? We seem to be in the grip of a deplorable war ethic where only fascism thrives in the political vacuum.

[@RoninTF2011]

Nope, another set of armchair activist arguing: let Ukrainaine die, so that we can have peace. The Neville Chamberlains of our time...disgusting.

[@ericmacrae6871]

I find it very odd that everyone solution is not diplomacy but more pressure on Russia

[@RoninTF2011]

@@ericmacrae6871 WHy? Because Russia are the Invader and the way to stop this war is...end the Invasion. Or would you think it would have been a good Idea to put presure on Poland in 1939 IOT stop the war then?

[@steelcom5976]

Since Putin has completely ignored the Budapest Memorandum that Russia signed in 1994, what makes you think Putin will honour any negotiated settlement now?

[@valireklaam]

Because Russia doesnt accept humanitarian concern and doesnt leave Ukraine territories voluntarily, therefore they will be beeaten like dogs

[@lozah9036]

Putin said no such thing! Get your facts right and LISTEN to the man! You clearly have no knowledge or understanding of russian nuclear doctrine. It is not them who have a no first use policy!

[@lozah9036]

@@okaytoletgo if you referring to me as a side taker, then DON'T. I am against the entire thing and it is because of my human compassion and the thought of these men in the trenches being blown away which appals me. All for the ego of their so called 'leader' who actually cares nothing for his people and his psychopath puppeters in washington. Only exception to this is nazi banderites who have been torturing and killing russians for 8 years. They deserve all they get.

[@frostflower5555]

Do the people in Eastern Ukraine have no say on their ancestral lands? They have been persecuted for a long time. There will only be peace once they separate and US stops meddling in Ukraine/Russian affairs. Zelensky is a current problem.

[@stevenfoulger6066]

Exactly. Finally someone pointed this out. I can't believe how many people out there are completely ignorant of this.

[@terjeoseberg990]

The people in eastern Ukrainian want nothing to do with Russia. Russia is not liberating anyone.

[@stevenfoulger6066]

@@terjeoseberg990 They ARE Russian. MANY have stated that they are safer under Russian control and have fled to Russian controlled areas.

[@frostflower5555]

@@terjeoseberg990 Get educated, and I don't mean by CNN, BBC...

[@terjeoseberg990]

@@frostflower5555, You get educated bro. You’re obviously brainwashed by Russian state TV lies.

[@leealexander3507]

There were many reasons I didn't like or approve of President Clinton.

[@terjeoseberg990]

Right. He convinced Ukraine to give all their nukes to Russia. That turned out to be a huge mistake.

[@chiarasanmarco79]

Yes he wanted at some point to put theirs

[@rickscheck5330]

“Noam need no introduction, blah, blah, blah-foist-blah…” skip to 2:10

[@claudiavivarelli7571]

I didn’t like what Chomsky had to say about those who chose not to have a shot. But in this I agree with him. The war in Ukraine was completely avoidable. Once more the US is fighting a proxy war In someone else’s country. And it stinks.

[@jamesslater9098]

Yes of course the war in Ukraine was completely avoidable by just simply submitting to Russia's demands to turn Ukraine into an imperialist puppet state. Only then would their be freedom. What a joke.

[@leroitiaks]

Starting premice is just wrong, as Russia only reacted to US nuclear crazyness.

[@pabis6817]

Pardon ? What US nuclear craziness?

[@leroitiaks]

@@pabis6817 The list is long but to take just one emblematic illustration: Obama threatened the use of nuclear power during his Nobel Peace[sic] Prize acceptance.

[@terjeoseberg990]

In the Cuban mission crisis Russia wanted to put nuclear missiles in Cuba. In Ukraine the United States convinced Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons.

[@leroitiaks]

@@terjeoseberg990 This lecture is so a-historical (i.e. ignores the historical event preceding it) that it is not worth responding to. Just read some US historian accounts (since you will likely frown upon anything that is not from the US as propaganda) to understand what happened.

[@pabis6817]

@@terjeoseberg990 it’s like everything you say has half of its factual context removed.

[@terjeoseberg990]

Nobody was planning on putting nukes in Ukraine. In fact, the United States negotiated for Ukraine to give up their nukes.

[@chiarasanmarco79]

At the end of the Soviet to remplace them later by their own maybe 🤔

[@terjeoseberg990]

@@chiarasanmarco79, Nope. And before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO was becoming irrelevant. But now NATO is growing.

[@johnlaudenslager706]

I'd like people better if it was clear Kruschev wanted nukes in Cuba to make its sovereignty invulnerable, and if we had nukes in many places to make the sovereignty of those places invulnerable. In other words, to be a guard against invasion of the weak by the strong. But the various reasons for these nuke deployments probably do not include the elimination of unilateral/multilateral invasion as a tool of the strong. Ukraine? Putin shows willingness to employ invasion and annexation, and the West resists without exressing anything like a principle that the strong should not be allowed to invade the weak. Negotiate with Putin? He probably would love a cease fire now or a peace deal that confirmed Russian possession of some face saving territory. But his heroes are imperial czars and a poet-philosopher that said Russia should take as much territory as it could between the East and the West. And Putin has said that Russia has a right to expand and Ukraine belongs to Russia. So, his aim, any cease fire or peace deal or not, is to sooner or later by one means or another control Kiev.

[@williamgatheist1314]

Thank you so much very informative. I do not see negotiations as long as the Russians remain on sq. centimeter of Ukrainian territory.

[@jstasiak2262]

Mr. Chomsky omits to mention another important reason for the Cuban Missile Crisis: Khrushchev and Kennedy met at a summit meeting in Vienna in June 1961. Khrushchev took the measure of Kennedy at that time and concluded that he was a lightweight and could be pushed around. Kennedy later said of Khrushchev, "He beat the hell out of me" and told New York Times reporter James 'Scotty' Reston immediately afterwards it was the "worst thing in my life. He savaged me." That is the real reason Khrushchev thought that ne could get away with putting nuclear missiles in Cuba.

[@daviddavies8637]

I seems to me that you only know the US history of the Cuban Crisis. US missiles were put in Italy and Turkey and USSR asked for them to be withdrawn but the US would not and so USSR decided to put their missiles in Cuba and look what the US did, they shit themselves and the tension increased. We thought the world would end until the hidden agreement, out of sight and not to be reported, that the US missiles would be taken away in Italy and Turkey. The facts could not be announced because it would embarrass the US and most people in this world today do not know this FACT because the US and the West must keep it's thumbs on the preception that Russia is nothing but evil. I have a thought that those missiles where only the outer shells and they were dummies, did you ever see any pics of launch equipemnt or launch pads. Who reports our news, who edits the editor.

[@Disconnectmyself]

"The 1990s saw an unprecedented openness for historians of the Missile Crisis, adding to the declassification of U.S. documents the openning of Soviet and Cuban archives. Two major conferences in Havana, on the 30th anniversary of the crisis in 1992, and on the 40th anniversary in 2002, brought together scholars and participants to further debate and clarify some of the major historical questions. Perhaps to the surprise of the earlier generation of Cold War scholars, many of the claims made by the Soviets and the Cubans, previously denied by U.S. sources, turned out to be true. The Cubans did fear another U.S. invasion, and plans for such an invasion were indeed in the works. Soviet nuclear capability was in fact far behind what the United States had developed. U.S. officials knew that their decision in 1961 to place operational nuclear missiles near Soviet borders in Turkey and Italy augmented the imbalance. The Soviet purpose of placing missiles in Cuba was to address real threats: to defend Cuba against U.S. attack and to respond to the global strategic and politi￾cal nuclear advantage held by the United States. The Soviets did not agree to withdraw the missiles because of Kennedy’s steely resolve. Rather, the United States agreed to Soviet demands that it publicly relinquish its plans to invade Cuba, and also that it remove its missiles in Turkey, which it agreed to privately. (Until the release of the declassified documents, U.S. officials roundly denied that any deal had been made with the Soviets.) Khrushchev was shaken, not by Kennedy’s strength of will, but by his recklessness and the real threat the U.S. stance posed of nuclear destruction. Despite U.S. promises, it refused to accept international oversight of its non‐intervention pledge, and in fact U.S. plans to overthrow the Cuban government continued unabated. Only days after promising Khrushchev that the United States would abandon any further attempt to invade the island, the Pentagon was preparing a document to qualify the pledge. “The president had promised to forego only an ‘armed seizure by U.S. forces,’” political scientist Lars Schoultz explains, summarizing and quoting the document, “while other actions such as a ‘Bay‐of‐Pigs‐type operation’ had not been ruled out.” Meanwhile Kennedy told his advisors that the promise had been a sham, and that “our objective is to preserve our right to invade Cuba.”"

[@janjorgendevries2927]

Great man but so wrong about the war in Ukraine.

[@drunkdrftr]

Evidence?

[@axlslak]

Long story short. Russia good. US bad. Same old Noam. I wonder why I am surprised. You can't really teach an old dog new tricks. At heart, he's the same isolationist he's always been. Guys like him are the reason we had to wait for 45 years to get rid of USSR and communism in Eastern Europe. And also the reason why we still not there yet. Just listen to him, complaining about negotiations. WTF is there to negotiate? The UN charter? Is that negotiable? How about the Helsinki agreements? Are those negotiable? How about the Budapest memorandum? Is that negotiable? Damn the international law and agreements. Noam wants to trade peace for parts of the world. Well Noam, let me tell you something. I'll give you and A and a B. Either: A. US stands by it's promises or B. US doesn't stand by it's promises. Either way, I can promise you that AT LEAST Eastern Europe will not roll over and quit. The only choice here is what the US wants to do. Either they want to lead, or get out the fucking way. But either way, we're done with Russia. Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Ukraine. We're done with Russia. And we got screwed enough during the last 75 years, and even before that. There will be no negotiations.

[@barracuda7018]

He is an enemy agent..The US is evil and every other whose on the other side is good. His brain is melting. Senile paranoid.

[@uince]

Just as Finnish Prime Minister said: “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine.” Why is this simple idea not entertained by Mr. Chomsky?

[@pyrefly7575]

Xd . Bcus that is "homeless people should just buy a house" tier of unintelligent of a statement. Russia cannot stop this war the way things are , he needs to be sure Ukraine won't join NATO and there won't be NATO missiles and access making frontier with Russia

[@pabis6817]

He can’t stop blaming America otherwise what was that lifetime of finger pointing actually for ? He’s got it wrong again!

[@terjeoseberg990]

Chomsky’s is obviously confused.

[@andreykaminskiy2391]

If you are a simpleton and are not able to understand what Chomsky is talking about, then especially for people like you there is a simple, accessible explanation: Putin is a madman, he hates Ukraine, freedom and democracy, he is a fascist who dreams of restoring the Soviet Union. This explanation could well be learned by a handyman on a farm, this is your level, stick to it. Leave Chomsky, he does not speak for you

[@jarekstawirej7120]

@@terjeoseberg990 He is not confused. He is deluded. For a long time.

[@mck1972]

Chomsky has NEVER worked in Government, Military, International Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Security, Law, or anything else outside Linguistics-And yet somehow he is being regarded as genuinely understanding this topic? Doesn't anyone else see how absurd this is? smh

[@mischevious]

He’s a self proclaimed dissident, makes knowing about it his business. I’ve never worked in any of those fields either and I know even more than Noam does about the current situation in Ukraine. The internet is great for those that bother to study. No costly degree or lofty connections required, those being the the only ..absurd distinctions you seem concerned with, just a brain and the willingness to use it.

[@mck1972]

@@mischevious , LOL So if you or, ' self-proclaimed dissident ', Chomsky simply, ' studies the internet ', about the human cardiovascular system, then does that make you qualified to perform heart surgery? After all, ' knowing about it is his business '! And, ' no costly degree is required '! ' Only a brain and willingness to use it '! Now do you see how absurd that is??? :-D :-D :-D

[@RoninTF2011]

Well, he is just armchair activist arguing: let Ukrainaine die, so that we can have peace. The Neville Chamberlains of our time...disgusting. The naive views of western leftists on russia are truly sad. In fact their are cheeleaders for a fascistoid, imperialist State.

[@mischevious]

@@mck1972 Chris sums it up far better than I ever could. kzbin.info/www/bejne/hWi5ppignpt_h9E Just in case you’d like to stop making an ass of yourself.

[@mischevious]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/hWi5ppignpt_h9E Chris sums it up far better than I ever could.. just in case you’d like to stop making an ass of yourself.

[@FathomFrequency]

Noam: dupe....one shot intellectual. Riding on his academic accolades. And ideological expansive books- takes his self evident predilection into the past wars. Carries it on into a careful depiction. I can tell a better story Noam. I don't believe your sincerity anymore. Let's get that straight.

[@benharriston2532]

I AM MORE WORRIED ABOT LYSENDY #@%!&% GRAHAM GETTING READY TO LOSE HIS SEAT LEGALLY...AND MOSCOW MITCH THAT DIDNT THINK I HEARD THE CHUMPS THREAT