from Microsoft's SLATE on-line newsmagazine:
Chomsky Speak
By Inigo Thomas
Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2001, at 3:25 PM PT
In Pakistan to promote the view that the United States sponsors terrorism,
Professor Noam Chomsky told an audience of 1,500 people that the 1998
bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory (wrongly believed by the CIA
to be an al-Qaida chemical weapons plant) may have resulted in the deaths
of several thousand people. (Other reports say that one or maybe two people
died at the factory after it was hit by U.S. cruise missiles.) This
instance of U.S. terrorism, Chomsky says, is an indication of what will
happen in Afghanistan. "Coalition forces [meaning American and British
forces together with their proxy, the Northern Alliance] are making plans
to further destroy the hunger-stricken country. The consequences of their
crimes will never be known and they are quite confident about that. And
that is the enormous outcome of the crime of the powerful ?"
Chomsky is famous for his analysis of U.S. government actions and the
language used by officials to blind the citizenry from the truth, yet in
this speech the MIT professor comes close to adopting the language of
distortion he abhors. Chomsky implies that the Afghan famine is a result of
U.S. and British military action, although an Afghan farmer might say that
a lack of rain in recent years as well as the Taliban regime were more
directly responsible for the dearth. Moroever, and contrary to what Chomsky
says, the United States and its allies are not planning to "further
destroy" Afghanistan, although they do hope to destroy the Taliban, whose
willful destruction of their own country has created a humanitarian
calamity. Finally, what truth is there in Chomsky's remark that the
"consequences of their crimes will never be known and they are quite
confident about that"? The implication is that the Americans and the
British are getting away with murder in Afghanistan, but if th!
e consequences of previous American actions have been revealed, and Chomsky
offers some examples in the very same speech, why is he so sure that the
consequences of these so-called "crimes" will remain a mystery? What's so
special about Afghanistan? Of course, you could also be led to believe that
no "crimes" have taken place in Afghanistan, in which case there will be
different consequences.
----
comments?
Jim Devine
_________________________________________________
The simple way to read all your emails at ThatWeb
http://www.thatweb.com