(In this article dated just yesterday, Chomsky talks about “the evil scourge of terrorism“… that’s the evil scourge of our state sponsored terrorism. He addresses several examples dating back to Robert Kennedy bringing “the terrorists of the world” to Cuba to try to overthrow Castro up to the Reagan “war on terror”, which was pretty much just a way to use terrorism to compel nations to do as we wished. Chomsky calls it a “return to barbarism in our time”. “Reagan was the first modern president to employ the audacious device of concealing his resort to “the evil scourge of terrorism” under the cloak of a “war on terror.”” Chomsky goes on to expose how terrorist have been enshrined in our national self-image… “ At Stanford University’s prestigious Hoover Institution Reagan is revered as a colossus whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.” We arrive by plane in Washington at Reagan international airport – or if we prefer, at John Foster Dulles international airport, honoring another prominent terrorist commander, whose exploits include overthrowing Iranian and Guatemalan democracy, installing the terror and torture state of the Shah and the most vicious of the terrorist states of Central America.”… This is an important article because in it, Chomsky is flirting with saying something entirely different from he has in the past…
“The attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 is called “the good war,” no questions asked, a justifiable act of self-defense with the noble aim of protecting human rights from the evil Tali-ban. There are a few problems with that near-universal contention. For one thing, the goal was not to remove the Taliban. Rather, Bush informed the people of Afghanistan that they would be bombed unless the Taliban turned bin Laden over to the US, as they might have done, had the US agreed to their request to provide some evidence of his responsibility for 9/11. The request was dismissed with contempt, for good reasons. As the head of the FBI conceded 8 months later, after the most intensive international investigation in history they still had no evidence, and certainly had none the preceding October. The most he could say is that the FBI “believed” that the plot had been hatched in Afghanistan and had been implemented in the Gulf Emirates and Germany.
Three weeks after the bombing began, war aims shifted to overthrow of the regime. British Admiral Sir Michael Boyce announced that the bombing would continue until “the people of the country…get the leadership changed” – a textbook case of international terrorism.”
…”In cases like these, the only rational conclusion is that the declared goals are not the real ones, and that if we want to learn about the real goals, we should adopt an approach that is familiar in the law: relying on predictable outcome as evidence for intent. I think the approach leads to quite plausible conclusions, for the “war on drugs,” the “war on terror,” and much else. That, however, is work for another day.” Chomsky)
by Noam Chomsky, the Erich Fromme Lecture, Information Clearinghouse
The president could not have been more justified when he condemned “the evil scourge of terrorism.” I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time,” to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration. When George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” 20 years later, he was re-declaring the war, an important fact that is worth exhuming from Orwell’s memory hole if we hope to understand the nature of the evil scourge of terrorism, or more importantly, if we hope to understand ourselves. We do not need the famous Delphi inscription to recognize that there can be no more important task. Just as a personal aside, that critical necessity was forcefully brought home to me almost 70 years ago in my first encounter with Erich Fromm’s work, in his classic essay on the escape to freedom in the modern world, and the grim paths that the modern free individual was tempted to choose in the effort to escape the loneliness and anguish that accompanied the newly-discovered freedom – matters all too pertinent today, unfortunately.
(more…)
Filed under: Fake War on Drugs, fake war on terror, noam Chomsky | 9 Comments »