>Michael Pollack:
>>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,
>[clip]
>
>I think yours would have been a better argument, but still
>Vietnam was further in the past and the World Court's judgement
>is in the records.
>
>It seems to me the point Chomsky was trying to make was the
>entirely reasonable one that the US would be in a better
>position to condemn terrorism if it didn't practice it itself.
>
>The hypocrisy is what seems to drive so many people here off
>the deep end. And probably many in the viewing audience knew
>from experience that moral crusaders like Bennett usually turn
>out to be hypocrites so I thought it was clever of Chomsky to
>attack on that point.
I don't know if hypocrisy really drives people off the deep end. Some get outraged by it; others don't.
>Having said that, I don't think Americans should be nuked by
>al Qaeda because of the crimes of Reagan, Kennedy, Johnson,
>Kissinger, etc., and all of their enablers (the people who voted for them,
>carried out their orders, etc.) A lot of Americans are trying to work to
>make the country less of a rogue state and many, many people
>are just living their lives and trying to get by best they can. This is
>where I disagree with Chomsky, b/c I think the war (or heavy duty
>police action) on al Qaeda is just. And failing to prosecute it
>vigorously would probably have horrible consequences.
>
>But still, I think it's possible that some CNN viewers who agree
>with me on that, could have had their minds changed by Chomsky
>(and by Bennett's idiotic, hectoring behavior) and find that he has a
>point in saying that the US should practice what it preaches: a simple,
>reasonable point. Bennett argued it does, but of course the record
>shows otherwise. Bennett could have made Chomsky look silly by
>pointing out that there are two sides in this war and you have to
>be nuts to side with fundamentalists who purposefully murdered
>3000 civilians in order to create Islamic states on the Taliban
>model and who will clearly kill again.
In the Vietnam War as well, there were two sides (actually more than two sides, but let's set aside complexity for the moment), and at the time when American involvement began (shortly after WW2) and escalated to the point of employment of ground troops and aerial bombings, it was not at all immediately obvious to most Americans that Communists were better than imperialists and fundamentalists. Back then, the Right argued that you'd have to be nuts to side with Communists who murdered many civilians (far more than 3,000, they'd assure you) and would clearly kill again. If you are the type swayed by the numbers and arguments given by _The Black Book of Communism_ and its predecessors -- "25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on" (@ <http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/COUBLA.html>) -- then you might even argue that the record of fundamentalists looks pretty good in comparison, as some no doubt did in an apology for US support for mujahideen in Afghanistan.
In short, no example in itself is likely to change anyone's mind. Some just have to learn the hard way, as a number of US veterans did. -- Yoshie
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