Daily Inspiration Quote by Noam Chomsky

Chomsky’s line works because it yanks “terrorism” out of the comforting third-person. The joke is bleakly simple: the “really easy way” isn’t a security upgrade or a new surveillance power, it’s a moral mirror. By framing terrorism as something “everybody” wants to stop, he mimics the consensus tone of politicians and cable news. Then he flips the premise: the hard part isn’t identifying terrorists “over there,” it’s admitting how often states and their publics enable terror-like violence when it wears a suit and comes with a flag.

The intent is less policy prescription than accusation. “Stop participating” collapses distance between taxpayer, voter, consumer, and the bombs dropped or coups backed in their name. The subtext is Chomsky’s long-running critique of euphemism: when non-state actors kill civilians it’s “terror,” when states do it it becomes “counterterror,” “stability,” “collateral damage.” He’s challenging the selective vocabulary that lets liberal democracies condemn atrocities while funding, arming, or rationalizing them.

Context matters: Chomsky has spent decades arguing that U.S. foreign policy routinely employs intimidation and civilian harm to achieve political ends, fitting standard definitions of terrorism even if it’s rarely labeled that way. Read in the post-9/11 “War on Terror” era, the line targets the ritualized panic that treats terrorism as an external infection rather than a tactic embedded in geopolitics. The quote’s power is its refusal to let innocence stand as a default setting. It dares the audience to accept that “we” might be the continuity in the problem we keep declaring an emergency.