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Chomsky on International Terrorism

shagg

Wading Through Bull****
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“'International terrorism' was placed at the center of attention by the Reagan Administration as soon as it was installed in 1981… The Administration was committed to three related policies, all achieved with considerable success: (1) transfer of resources from the poor to the rich; (2) an enormous increase in the state sector of the economy in the traditional American way, through the Pentagon system, a device used to make the public finance high-technology industry by means of the state-guaranteed market for the production of high-technology waste and thus to contribute to the program of public subsidy, private profit, called 'free enterprise'; and (3) a substantial increase in U.S. intervention, subversion, and international terrorism (in the true sense of the expression). Such policies cannot be presented to the public in the terms in which they are intended. They can be implemented only if the population is properly frightened by monsters against whom they must defend themselves.”

Noam Chomsky - Pirates and Emperors

This is NOT an attempt to divert any responsibility for anything to do with Syria away from Obama.

Do you feel the government has a heavily vested interest in making sure there's always a fire burning somewhere, so that we can play with our fire trucks and show the world how good they are? To varying degrees most people (in my opinion) feel that a certain level of misdirection exists in any administration, its simply part of the game. But do you feel this sort of structured perpetual "fleecing" is real? Is it justified or necessary?
 
Yes but, not the government...the elitist PTBs.

WAR = PROFITS especially if both sides are well funded.
 

Noam Chomsky - Pirates and Emperors

This is NOT an attempt to divert any responsibility for anything to do with Syria away from Obama.

Do you feel the government has a heavily vested interest in making sure there's always a fire burning somewhere, so that we can play with our fire trucks and show the world how good they are? To varying degrees most people (in my opinion) feel that a certain level of misdirection exists in any administration, its simply part of the game. But do you feel this sort of structured perpetual "fleecing" is real? Is it justified or necessary?

Chomsky always writes as if there is no threat to which the US is responding. In his world the Cold War didn't exist, and there was no threat from the Soviet Union, which in fact was attempting to cut the US off from its allies and resources and kill it, and there was no threat from terrorism, as if the attack on 9-11 never took place and there was no concern about follow-on attacks and what they would do to our economy and security. No, the US just uses these threats as a pretext to be evil or greedy or something, according to him.

It's a profoundly dishonest way to discuss these issues. Only an idiot, ignorant of history, would find him impressive.
 
Chomsky always writes as if there is no threat to which the US is responding. In his world the Cold War didn't exist, and there was no threat from the Soviet Union, which in fact was attempting to cut the US off from its allies and resources and kill it, and there was no threat from terrorism, as if the attack on 9-11 never took place and there was no concern about follow-on attacks and what they would do to our economy and security. No, the US just uses these threats as a pretext to be evil or greedy or something, according to him.

It's a profoundly dishonest way to discuss these issues. Only an idiot, ignorant of history, would find him impressive.

I wouldn't necessarily call him impressive. He's intelligent, and hes got balls, but he's borderline conspiracy theorist. Certainly extreme in his views.

But is he on to something? Its hard to deny the fact that there are forces in the world who actively seek to injure the US in whatever significant way possible. The question posed by Chomsky is whether or not the threat is of a magnitude to warrant all the time, money, energy, political clout, man hours, and lives we spend addressing it. Does the government make appropriately sized mountains of the available molehills to convince us the type of government the governments wants to be is needed?
 
Chomsky's themes are the very same as those offered up in Bin Laden's Letters to America. They may be repackaged in order to dress up the rhetoric in some nice purple colors, but his polemics are so derivative in nature as to bely all that intelligence people insist on applying to him.

Warmed over pap is warmed over pap.
 
I wouldn't necessarily call him impressive. He's intelligent, and hes got balls, but he's borderline conspiracy theorist. Certainly extreme in his views.

But is he on to something? Its hard to deny the fact that there are forces in the world who actively seek to injure the US in whatever significant way possible. The question posed by Chomsky is whether or not the threat is of a magnitude to warrant all the time, money, energy, political clout, man hours, and lives we spend addressing it. Does the government make appropriately sized mountains of the available molehills to convince us the type of government the governments wants to be is needed?

No, Chomsky is ascribing bad faith and evil intent to the US government. He's very clear about it. According to what you quote, the Administration deliberately ginned up the counter-terrorism effort in order to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, enrich the defense industry, and subvert and wage terrorism on other countries. It's not a matter of mismatching resources to the task. To him there is no legitimate task at hand because he recognizes no significant threat to which the US must respond.

It's no different, in other words, from most of what he writes about US history.
 
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