On Thu, 30 May 2002, Michael McIntyre wrote:
> (3) Bourdieu argued, rightly I think, that television only works for
> "fast thinkers" who do nothing more that cast a banal intellectual gloss
> over the affair as they instantiate the accepted verities?
Fair enough as a global point, that wasn't the problem here IMHO. Chomsky knew full well he'd be have one point to make, and he prepared it beforehand, and he stuck to even more doggedly than Bennett. He just made a terrible choice. If I was trying to prove the US was a terrorist state, I wouldn't stake everything on the fact that the World Court called us one sort-of 20 years ago when we were mining Nicaragua's harbors. That's legalism squared and then draped over an historical footnote. He shoulda said Terrorism is when you kill civilians on purpose to make a point or to break their will, and the US did exactly that on an epic scale in Vietnam. We killed millions, and for what? And the US has supported massacres and torture and repression on equally huge scales in lots of other countries -- all of which dwarfs the isolated attacks that non-state actors can muster. Then for follow ups give examples of one huge forgotten massacre after another that we propped up: Guatemala, Indonesia, East Timor, etc.
I'm not sure I'm a fan of the terrorist state trope, but this seems like the obvious way to make the argument for someone who is. The way he chose seemed to me completely head up his ass. With a plan like that he deserved to lose what amounted to a three minute one round fight. With a better plan he could have won.
Fwiw, which I agree, is not much in itself.
Michael