Politics & Power Quote by Noam Chomsky

It’s a deliberately incendiary line, engineered to short-circuit the comfort of “victors’ justice.” By invoking the Nuremberg Laws, Chomsky drags American power out of its preferred moral costume and into the dock designed for defeated enemies. The shock isn’t incidental; it’s the mechanism. “Hanged” isn’t metaphorical policy critique, it’s the language of criminal accountability, forcing the listener to ask whether international law is a real constraint or a rhetorical accessory applied selectively.

The intent is less about literal legal equivalence than about exposing asymmetry: Nuremberg is celebrated as a civilizational benchmark, yet in Chomsky’s framing it becomes a mirror that a hegemon refuses to face. The subtext is a charge of hypocrisy: if aggressive war, mass civilian killing, and state terror are crimes when Nazis do them, then they don’t become “hard choices” when a superpower does. He’s also attacking the way American political culture launders violence through bureaucracy and distance - drone strikes, covert action, sanctions - practices that feel clean in process even when the outcomes aren’t.

Context matters. Chomsky speaks from the post-Vietnam lineage of American dissent, when televised war cracked official narratives and “national security” became an all-purpose permission slip. His provocation relies on a kind of moral jujitsu: he borrows the West’s own most sacred tribunal and turns it against the West’s self-image. The line works because it forces an uncomfortable binary: either Nuremberg is universal, or it’s pageantry.