(no subject)

[LeoCasey at aol.com]

The obvious analogy to the destruction of the World Trade Center, with its 
deliberate, calculated murder of the maximum number of innocent 
people,  was the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, 
also designed to murder the maximum number of innocent people. That Chomsky 
-- and you -- should choose as a point of comparison not the bombings of 
the embassies [the hundreds of dead Africans and Americans are just 
"invisible men" in your world view, because you can not blame their deaths 
on the American state], but the response intended to strike at the capacity 
to inflict such mass murder, a response which was designed to minimize the 
loss of human life, and which took but on, is telling in and of itself. 
There is good reason, as I just wrote in reply to Brad, to think that the 
Sudanese factory bombing was a mistake that did nothing to actually 
diminish the capacity of Bin Laden to organize mass murder, or Sudan to 
sponsor it. But to suggest that the bombing of the Sudanese factory is an 
equivalent crime to the WTC destruction, as Estabrook now does, much less 
that it is a greater crime, as Chomsky originally did, is a deep and 
offensive insult to the memory of those thousands upon thousands who 
actually did die.

What troubles me about the capacity of a Chomsky to take such a morally 
blind stance is that he and I started out politically from the same 
position, on the democratic left and in opposition to the war in Vietnam. 
We started out from a motivation of ending needless human suffering and 
death. It is deeply disturbing that he has become so fixated on the ways in 
which the American state contributes to that suffering and death, that he 
can no longer see any other source of it, that he has become so fixated on 
the American state that he is prepared  to minimize the deaths of these 
untold innocents, so long as their lives are taken in opposition to 
"American imperialism," that he has lost complete touch with actual human 
suffering as he parades his concern for human suffering in the abstract. 
This blindness is so awful that my fear, if anything, is that I might, at 
some point, have participated in it.


>You don't read very well, do you?
>
>Neither Chomsky nor I say that terrorist attack on New York is "a small 
>matter next to a missile raid by the US on a factory that killed one 
>Sudanese." We both contend that more people probably died as a result of 
>the US terrorist attack on Sudan than died in New York. I see two 
>horrendous crimes with political causes: you see one.
>
>Ah, but perhaps your ignorance of what Chomsky and I wrote is wilful, 
>because you then offer a justification of the terrorist attack on Sudan 
>("the attack on the factory in Sudan was in response to the bombings of 
>embassies in Kenya and Tanzania"), whereas Chomsky and I think that 
>neither terrorist attack was justified. (In regard to the Sudan, I agree 
>with Nat Hentoff -- and I presume yourself -- who has pointed out in the 
>midst of a vast silence from liberals that the government is promoting 
>slavery and oppressing the people of the south.)
>
>And you once again choose to miss the point about the attack on the 
>pharmaceutical plant, this time with a pompous pleonasm ("things ... can 
>be replaced, and human lives can not be replaced") -- that the result was 
>thousands of deaths, which you apparently consider "a small matter."
>
>BTW, are you having trouble with your eyes? It occurs to me that your 
>repetition of "...sick, myopic..." as terms of abuse is not just risible, 
>it may indicate something you're worried about ("blinded," too, I notice). 
>Maybe that explains why you couldn't read what I (or Chomsky) wrote...

.