Chomsky's point was that the atrocities in the US this week are exceeded simply in the numbers of dead people by many other crimes in recent years. And when the US is responsible for them, they tend to be set aside in the national consciousness. If you asked Americans, How many events was the Clinton Administration responsible for that killed more people than died in New York this week?, most could name none. But examples from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East are replete. The Clinton Administration killed thousands in Timor, in Colombia, perhaps ten thousand in Somalia, not to mention thousands and thousands of Arabs. That's what Chomsky means by saying of this week's terrorist attacks that "In scale they may not reach the level of many others ... But that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt." --CGE
On Fri, 14 Sep 2001 LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
> 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.