Great Noam Chomsky interview. If he offends you on the basis of what he professes, don't bother. If, on the other hand, you want a reasonable analysis, please read on. Snippets follow:
The basic situation remains as before. It is not a confrontation between two local adversaries, and even between those too there is nothing remotely like symmetry. Israel is a major military power, backed fully by the global superpower. For 35 years, it has occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinians are alone, defenseless....the US-Israel coalition has been settling the areas of the occupied territories they intend to integrate within Israel, and acting to ensure Israeli control over the major resource of the West Bank: water.
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The US demands that Arafat, imprisoned in a dungeon where he cannot even flush the toilet, must produce yet another condemnation of Palestinian terrorism, which everyone knows to be completely meaningless. No one even suggests that Sharon should condemn his much worse ongoing atrocities, or that the US government, which provides the crucial support for them them, should do so.
... Military industry has some role but not a dominant one. Twenty years ago, the Reagan administration came into office proclaiming that a "war on terror" would be the core of US foreign policy, and we need not review how they fought that war. "Terrorism" plays a role similar to "Communism," "crime," "drugs," and other devices to frighten the public into supporting policies undertaken to serve the interests of the state and domestic power centers; when one pretext loses its efficacy (like "Communism"), others take its place at once, with scarcely a murmur from the educated classes. None of this, of course, is peculiar to the US. This is the way states and other power systems operate. Surely these are among the clearest lessons of history. ... The US is far too powerful to have any need to submit to an international authority. That is why it blithely rejects World Court condemnation, vetoes or ignores Security Council resolutions, and in general disregards international law and treaties when it chooses. As the world's most powerful state, it guards its sovereignty zealously, while ignoring the sovereignty of others as it chooses. Again, there is nothing new or surprising about this. ... No sane person is opposed to globalization, that is, international integration. Surely not the left and the workers movements, which were founded on the principle of international solidarity - that is, globalization in a form that attends to the rights of people, not private power systems. ... To speak of "abandoned socialism" presupposes that there was some socialism that was abandoned. That is quite an exaggeration. There have been moves towards traditional socialist ideals of the kind described by Dewey - who I quoted not because the observations are original, but because he is America's leading social philosopher, "as American as apple pie," in the standard phrase. Such initiatives have often been demolished by force, not only in the West. The first acts of Lenin and Trotsky after taking power were to destroy the factory councils and Soviets, and in fact just about every socialist tendency that had developed before the Bolshevik takeover. From then until its collapse, the Soviet tyranny was one of the major anti-socialist forces in the world. ... The US is unusual, perhaps unique, in its protection for freedom of speech. ... The US, in my opinion, finally reached a proper standard in the 1960s, after centuries of struggle, when the Supreme Court struck down the laws of seditious libel that made it a crime to assault the state with words, and established the standard that speech is protected up to direct participation in ongoing crime: if you and I are robbing a store, you have a gun, and I say "shoot," my speech is not protected. You decide. ZNet | Terror War | Noam Chomsky Interviewed |
