[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on the reason for the war

[C. G. Estabrook]

Hitchens was regarded as a writer on the Left (a notoriously elastic term)
up to his support for the invasion of Afghanistan, in spite of his support
for the Falklands War and the attack on Kosovo.  Twenty years ago, for
example, he wrote a detailed defense of Chomsky against some of the
standard slanders of Noam (re Faurisson, Cambodia, Israel), which is still
worth reading ("The Chorus and Cassandra").  For the record, Hitchens
claims (fantastically) that it's Chomsky who's changed, not he -- even
though in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq he went so far as contending
that Saddam Hussein must have known about 9/11 before the fact.

I've argued that Hitchens' politics are formed by theology, not economics:
he considers theism, not capitalism, to be the problem of the age.  9/11
was an intellectual gift to him: the enemy was revealed, he thought, as
what he calls it in this article -- "theocratic fascism" (in fact a rather
inaccurate term for the people who staged the 9/11 attacks).  I once
started a piece I called "Little Christopher and Big God," but I never
finished it...  --CGE


On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, jencart wrote:

> I loved this article, Carl.  Yeah, I'm a Chomsky fan, too.... 
> 
> Since when is the ever-irritating Christopher Hitchens -- he's
> annoying even when he happens to say something I agree with -- a
> "colleague on the left?
> 
> Jenifer C.
> -------------------------------------------------------------- Dealing
> with terror, Chomsky believes, requires a "dual programme" along the
> lines of "what the British did in Northern Ireland". He says: "The
> terrorist acts are criminal acts so you apprehend the guilty, use
> force if necessary and bring them to a fair trial. They want to appeal
> to the reservoir of understanding for what they're doing, even from
> people who hate and fear them. If they can mobilise that reservoir
> they win. We can help them mobilise that reservoir by violence or we
> can reduce it by dealing with legitimate grievances."
> 
> "Every resort to violence has been a gift to the jihadists.  Respond
> with violence which hits civilians and you're giving a gift to Osama
> bin Laden; you're giving him the propaganda weapon he wants so he can
> say, 'We have to defend Islam against the Western infidels trying to
> destroy it. We're fighting a war of defence'."
> 
> "If you want to mobilise that constituency that is the way to
> intervene. But there is another way and that is to pay attention to
> the legitimate grievance. That's intervention too."
> 
> THE CV
> 
> Born: 7 December, 1928 in Philadelphia, son of William Chomsky, a
> Hebrew scholar
> 
> 1949: Marries linguist Carol Schatz. Three children
> 
> 1955: Doctorate in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
> 
> 1957: His book Syntactic Structures revolutionises the field of
> linguistics. Begins teaching at MIT
> 
> 1964: Active against the Vietnam War, including organising tax strikes
> 
> 1969: Lectures at MIT on "Government in the Future" and deeply
> impresses the young and impressionable C. G. Estabrook, who sees no
> reason to change his opinion 35 years later
> 
> 1980-92: Cited as a source more than any other living scholar, Arts
> and Humanities Citation Index shows
> 
> 2001: Likens the 9/11 attacks to US bombing of al-Shifa pharmaceutical
> plant in Sudan. Says in book after the attack: "Wanton killing of
> innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism"
> 
>     ###
>