[url=http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3369] Iraq is a trial run
Chomsky interviewed by Frontline
by Noam Chomsky and VK Ramachandran
Frontline India
April 02, 2003[/url]
powerhouse of anti-imperialist activism
That is part of the deep racism of Western culture, going back through centuries of imperialism and so deep that it is unconscious.
Noam, you have seen movements of resistance to imperialism over a long period - Vietnam, Central America, Gulf War I.
Sitran, all three of those quotes are reminiscent of the Soviet inspired rhetoric of the 1960s-1980s. They also bring to mind "Newspeak" from Orwell’s 1984.
Remember, he is being interviewed by an Indian correspondant:
. . . So, for example, when India invaded East Pakistan to terminate horrendous massacres, it did not establish a new norm of humanitarian intervention, because India is the wrong country, . . .
Also . . .
In 1963, Dean Acheson, who was a much respected elder statesman and senior Adviser of the Kennedy Administration, gave an important talk to the American Society of International Law, in which he justified the U. S. attacks against Cuba. The attack by the Kennedy Administration on Cuba was large-scale international terrorism and economic warfare. The timing was interesting - it was right after the Missile Crisis, when the world was very close to a terminal nuclear war. In his speech, Acheson said that "no legal issue arises when the United States responds to challenges to its position, prestige or authority", or words approximating that.
That is also a statement of the Bush doctrine. Although Acheson was an important figure, what he said had not been official government policy in the post-War period. It now stands as official policy and this is the first illustration of it. It is intended to provide a precedent for the future.
. . . he seems to have forgotten the Monroe Doctrine as it relates to Cuba.
. . . Ramachandran :Noam, you have seen movements of resistance to imperialism over a long period - Vietnam, Central America, Gulf War I. . . .
Chomsky : Oh, that is correct; there is just nothing like it. . . . There is only one way to fight a war now. First of all, pick a much weaker enemy, one that is defenceless. Then build it up in the propaganda system as either about to commit aggression or as an imminent threat. Next, you need a lightning victory. An important leaked document of the first Bush Administration in 1989 described how the U.S. would have to fight war. It said that the U.S. had to fight much weaker enemies, and that victory must be rapid and decisive, as public support will quickly erode. It is no longer like the 1960s, when a war could be fought for years with no opposition at all.
[rant]
Well, Dr. Chumpsky, you should have read Churchill’s The Gathering Storm. This is straight out of Hitler’s playbook, not Bush’s.
Although it is true that public support would normally quickly erode, the attacks of 9/11 changed all that: we were attacked, sucker-punched as sure as we were by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.
And please, Doctor, let’s not get started on Viet Nam. Knowing what I do now, I feel I was misled not by the Government of the 1960s, but by both the post-World War II government and the 1960s Radical Left. If our friends, the French, had let Ho Chi Min have his independence, he may have stayed with the West, even in the French sphere, instead of enlisting the support of the Communists. As for the Left, for every alleged American atrocity, I’ve heard from someone who was there that there were many more VC and NVA atrocities.
I fault Bush for attacking Iraq before finishing off bin Laden, the Taliban, and the warlords in Afghanistan, but we must finish what we started in Iraq, or we will be no better than the pre-World War II British governments, especially that of Neville Chamberlain that guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s borders, only to allow it to be divvied up amongst Germany, Hungary, and Poland. The US has learned the hard way that we cannot be isolationist as we were before the two World Wars of the last century, and we cannot depend upon others to look out for our interests. I remain convinced that even though Iraq may not have had a direct hand in the events of 9/11, they most assuredly had an indirect hand in supporting anyone who would go after the country that threw the invaders out of Kuwait. Had the British kept Hitler out of the Rhineland in the first place, World War II might have been prevented.
We are indeed caught between Iraq and a hard place.
[/rant]
I was late in observing the topic. Then, seeing whom was featured, I automatically and quickly skipped it. I began my linguistics studies in ca. 1960. After my first encounter with transformational grammar, I fled back and finished my engineering degree.
As I see it, TG’s do not add a thing to our knowledge of how languages work. The Chomsky theories assume that language behaves like a computer from the 60’s: only capable of binary choices, one processor and one process at a time, trudging along in just two dimensions. Even earthworms are smarter than that - they use three dimensions. On of my theories is that we have serveral processes going on at the same time in our brains. Is thinking even a conscious process? And, but now I am perhaps veering towards psycho-linguistics, how do I do when I am translating?
- Anders
(And and but required hard thinking to start a sentence with.)
[quote author=anders link=board=omni;num=1081394567;start=0#7 date=04/08/04 at 15:57:27]Stargzer,
I was late in observing the topic. Then, seeing whom was featured, I automatically and quickly skipped it. I began my linguistics studies in ca. 1960. After my first encounter with transformational grammar, I fled back and finished my engineering degree.
. . .
Anders,
Like me and a buzz post, no doubt! :D
I was a Chemistry major and took a Linguistics course the second semester of my freshman year of college as the only English course I ever took (I had a high Verbal score on the SATs and they were overcrowded with freshman that year (they had planned on a freshman class of 650 but ended up with 775), so they exempted me from the freshman English requirement in the core curriculum).
Our professor was a visiting professor from a university across town. I think he was a better linguist than he was a teacher; he was at one time an editor of American Speech. He did not like Chomsky, perhaps in part because Chomsky was originally a mathematician, I believe, and not a linguist. He liked Allan Walker Reed (Reid? Read?) a lot (and I like Reed’s article on the Rebel Yell!), but he did not like another linguist, whose name I think was Pei (at least it was pronounce like "pay"—we are talking 34 year ago here, the Spring of 1970 and Nixon’s Cambodian Incursion here ("Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. . . ") but how that and the resulting Academic Strike that spring affected the linguistics class is another story!).
He and another linguist wrote a short book about a theory called Parametric Linguistics. As I recall, it had something to do with recognizing that the human vocal tract can make a number of sounds, such as aspirated/unaspirated, labial/dental, fricative, gutteral, and all the other various terms; but not all languages use all of the sounds. If you build a table of the sounds for each language, you find "holes" in the table where that doesn’t use a particular sound. That’s about all I can remember. If I can ever find the book again I’ll try reading it again and start a thread on it.
[quote author=Sitran link=board=omni;num=1081394567;start=0#8 date=04/08/04 at 18:08:10]Well, shoot! I thought someone would have a reaction to this topic!
[quote author=Stargzer link=board=omni;num=1081394567;start=0#5 date=04/08/04 at 14:52:37]Remember, he is being interviewed by an Indian correspondant:
Stargzer, I’m in awe. Cut through the crap. Expose the horse doo-doo. Gosh, it’s like we’re swimming in it.
Thank you, Larry, for being a rock in a pool of crap, a voice of reason in a media flora that mostly consists of wilting day lillies.
Thank you, Larry, for being a rock in a pool of crap, a voice of reason in a media flora that mostly consists of wilting day lillies.
You are both worth your weight!
It was such a recent article that I thought that we would all like to see the kind of lunacy and BS this man is spreading in the name of intellectual honesty while we are at war.
The Left is always saying, "American this, America that!"
When did you hear them say, "China this, or China that!?"
Or during the cold war, "Russia this, Russia that!"
If our media is wedded to some weird "Pseudo-Capitalist Conspiracy" it is sure hidden behind alot of "Ultra-Liberal Socialist Wannabees" rhetoric.
Let’s just surrender to Europe and be done with it.
Chomsky : Oh, that is correct; there is just nothing like it. . . . There is only one way to fight a war now. First of all, pick a much weaker enemy, one that is defenceless. Then build it up in the propaganda system as either about to commit aggression or as an imminent threat. Next, you need a lightning victory. An important leaked document of the first Bush Administration in 1989 described how the U.S. would have to fight war. It said that the U.S. had to fight much weaker enemies, and that victory must be rapid and decisive, as public support will quickly erode. It is no longer like the 1960s, when a war could be fought for years with no opposition at all.
Thanks for posting this quote, Stargazer.
It is noteworthy that while Chompsky mentions Gulf War I, in the interview, he later mentions the Bush Administration, making no mention whatsoever of Sadam Hussein’s agression toward Kuwait and apparent intended aggression against Saudi Arabia.
At the time Hussein had what was then thought to be the most powerful military in the middle east, with 4,000 tanks, plenty of aircraft, and a large army.
As I recall, Hussein excused his invasion of Kuwait by saying that they were stealing Iraq’s oil.
The fact that Chomsky mentions Bush 41 and not Hussein in his discription of imperialism is a clear example of his intellectual dishonesty.
(Thank you, Sitran).
Hussein did have a large and powerful military, it seems that he just didn’t know how to use it properly. I remember hearing a report that over time he had executed all of his best generals because he did not trust them. Since he openly admired Adolph Hitler maybe he felt his generals were conspiring against him, as some of Germany’s military leaders did against Hitler.
Chomsky’s reference to "an important leaked document of the first Bush administration" seems suspect as well.
He does not say where the document appeared or how it was authenticated. Nor does he state the entire context. By that time (1989) it was already beginning to be apparent that all of the other military powers in the world were much weaker than the U.S. in conventional forces.
It has been said of the United States that no nation in history has had greater military power nor used it less.
Since 1989 (referring to the quoted Chomsky interview) the U.S. military has been used to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, to assist the U.N. in an attempt to depose a warlord in Somalia who was responsible for the starvation of thousands, probably tens of thousands, of people, to assist in ending the atrocities that were taking place in Eastern Europe in the 1990’s, to end bloodshed in Haiti, and to respond to attacks on the United States that began in the late 1990s (two U.S. embassies in Africa, and the U.S.S. Cole) and ending with the 9/11 attacks. Oh yes, and to protect the prosperous nation of South Korea from further aggression by North Korea.
It would be a stretch to define any of the above as imperialistic.
