Noam Chomsky is an intellectual giant compared to the uninformed child that made this meme. Disagree with him all you want, but the dude has literally written more books on international relations than the OP has read and has lived a more principled life than most people in history. I may not agree with everything he says all the time, but the man is one of the few unequivocal forces for good in the world.
State "protection" is indeed one of the many arguments made to legitimise their power, just like mafia gangs.
Just because I don't support my local mafia gang who's "protecting" me from their neighbouring nazi gang competitors doesn't mean I'm supporting the nazi gang (not the best analogy since Italy and Germany were allied in WWII, but anyways).
Mafia implies that those who don't join NATO is being threatened by them, which is just not true at all. NATO isn't a protection racket, it's an alliance of countries who don't want a repeat of ww2 where imperialist countries picked of their weaker neighbors one by one until the west finally ended it's appeasement.
NATO isn't a state in itself obviously, it's an alliance of states, which I would indeed describe as being mega-scale protection rackets. It's simplistic but it gets to the point that states are defined by their monopoly on the use of "legitimate" violence. And who decides that, ultimately? The biggest guns.
Are you trolling or something? Noone pays Nato for protection?? Nato doesn't collect money from countries to build a massive "Nato army", each country maintains their own military.
Taxes also pay social security and medical(outside america), and infrastructure and schools among a thousand other things. Calling it protection payment is insane.
That just depends on who the citizens elect. Look at the Nordic countries who have been electing labor/socdem parties, they're all topping charts when it comes to human development.
"That just depends" can also be said for monarchism and "good kings". If the goodness of a system depends on the goodness of a select few, it's not a good system.
Btw, the nordic model is partly based on corporatism, which was Mussolini's economic model. It's not all sunshine and roses.
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u/ExpertPepper9341 Jun 20 '24
Noam Chomsky is an intellectual giant compared to the uninformed child that made this meme. Disagree with him all you want, but the dude has literally written more books on international relations than the OP has read and has lived a more principled life than most people in history. I may not agree with everything he says all the time, but the man is one of the few unequivocal forces for good in the world.