recent Chomsky talk

[Doug Millison]

"[...] The last time that the national territory of the United States was
under attack, or for that matter, even threatened was when the British
burned down Washington in 1814. There have been many...it was common to
bring up Pearl Harbor but that's not a good analogy. The Japanese, what
ever you think about it, the Japanese bombed military bases in 2 US
colonies not the national territory; colonies which had been taken from
their inhabitants in not a very pretty way. This is the national territory
that's been attacked on a large scale, you can find a few fringe examples
but this is unique.

During these close to 200 years, we, the United States expelled or mostly
exterminated the indigenous population, that's many millions of people,
conquered half of Mexico, carried out depredations all over the region,
Caribbean and Central America, sometimes beyond, conquered Hawaii and the
Philippines, killing several 100,000 Filipinos in the process. Since the
Second World War, it has extended its reach around the world in ways I
don't have to describe. But it was always killing someone else, the
fighting was somewhere else, it was others who were getting slaughtered.
Not here. Not the national territory.

Europe

In the case of Europe, the change is even more dramatic because its history
is even more horrendous than ours. We are an offshoot of Europe, basically.
For hundreds of years, Europe has been casually slaughtering people all
over the world. That's how they conquered the world, not by handing out
candy to babies. During this period, Europe did suffer murderous wars, but
that was European killers murdering one another. The main sport of Europe
for hundreds of years was slaughtering one another. The only reason that it
came to an end in 1945, was....it had nothing to do with Democracy or not
making war with each other and other fashionable notions. It had to do with
the fact that everyone understood that the next time they play the game it
was going to be the end for the world. Because the Europeans, including us,
had developed such massive weapons of destruction that that game just have
to be over. And it goes back hundreds of years. In the 17th century, about
probably 40% of the entire population of Germany was wiped out in one war.

But during this whole bloody murderous period, it was Europeans
slaughtering each other, and Europeans slaughtering people elsewhere. The
Congo didn't attack Belgium, India didn't attack England, Algeria didn't
attack France. It's uniform. There are again small exceptions, but pretty
small in scale, certainly invisible in the scale of what Europe and us were
doing to the rest of the world. This is the first change. The first time
that the guns have been pointed the other way. And in my opinion that's
probably why you see such different reactions on the two sides of the Irish
Sea which I have noticed, incidentally, in many interviews on both sides,
national radio on both sides. The world looks very different depending on
whether you are holding the lash or whether you are being whipped by it for
hundreds of years, very different. So I think the shock and surprise in
Europe and its offshoots, like here, is very understandable. It is a
historic event but regrettably not in scale, in something else and a reason
why the rest of the world...most of the rest of the world looks at it quite
differently. Not lacking sympathy for the victims of the atrocity or being
horrified by them, that's almost uniform, but viewing it from a different
perspective. Something we might want to understand. [...]


http://www.counterpunch.org/chomskyterror.html
October 24, 2001
The New War Against Terror
By Noam Chomsky
[Transcribed from audio recorded during Chomsky's talk at The
Technology & Culture Forum at MIT]





Doug Millison - Writer/Editor/Web Editorial Consultant
millison at online-journalist.com
www.Online-Journalist.com