The weakness of the anti-war movement

C. G. Estabrook galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Wed May 19 22:32:00 PDT 1999


On Wed, 19 May 1999, Nathan Newman wrote (responding to Chomsky)--


> ... if such mass opinion can have the effect of circumscribing bad
> intervention, it can have the effect (admittedly harder at times) of
> pushing forward good intervention. And that good intervention can be
> motivated by and embody a moral instinct, not purely self-interested
> instinct. So while I disagree with Chomsky on this war, I agree with
> the general more hopeful point he has about the efficacy of mass action,
> a good counter-balance to the comfortable defeatism of much of the Left.

In fact, well before the current horrors Chomsky was quite skeptical of "good intervention" by the US: in the winter of '93-4 he wrote in the *Boston Review* that history "reveals, unequivocally, that the category of 'humanitarian intervention' is vanishingly small ... The declared intent, the record of planning, and the actual policies implemented, with their persistent leading themes, will not be overlooked by someone seriously considering 'humanitarian intervention,' which, in this world, means intervention authorized or directed by the United States ... [These show that] Human rights have purely instrumental value in the political culture; they provide a useful tool for propaganda, nothing more ... The prevailing mood [in the rest of the world, as a result] was captured by a leading Brazilian theologian, Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Sao Paulo: throughout the South 'there is hatred and fear: When will they decide to invade us,' and on what pretext? The Nicaraguan case raises another issue that will not be overlooked by serious people considering the prospects for 'humanitarian intervention.' The leader of such intervention will be a state that is remarkable not only for its violence, impudence, and moral cowardice, but also for its lawlessness ... Can our political and intellectual culture, our society and institutions, undergo the radical transformations that would be required for an American citizen to use such phrases as 'American humanitarian intervention' or 'enlargement of the world's free community of market democracies' without shame?"

Chomsky apparently doesn't believe those transformations have occurred in the last five years.

The full text can be found at <www-polisci.mit.edu/BR18.6/chomsky.html>.

--C. G. Estabrook



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