> Brian Siano wrote:
>
> > This was one of the better points Christopher Hitchens raised against
> > the antiwar movement. Its concern for the Kurds seemed to stop with
> > Saddam's having used poison gas against them, and the U.S. rewarded the
> > guy with more weapons. I have no doubt that there were Kurdish-relief
> > and Kurdish defense efforts within the movement, but for the most part,
> > the antiwar movement didn't mobilize around this particular cause.
> > (Hitchens got a lot of mileage out of a "true internationalist" stance;
> > it wasn't hard to poke at the antiwar movement's platitudes, and as long
> > as he stuck to internationalism, human rights, and opposition to
> > theocratic fascism, he raised some good points. But his praise of the
> > Bush Administration was pretty revolting; if I wanted to see a man
> > pimping for state power, I'd read _Commentary_.)
This being a thread whose subject is Chomsky...in the film "Manufacturing Consent", David Frum (who would later go on to coin the phrase "axis of evil") accuses Chomsky of not caring about the Kurds. Chomsky cuts him off and says
"That's not true at all. I've been involved in Kurdish support groups for years. Just ask the people who are involved in Kurdish support groups. I mean, they come to me, I sign their petitions, and so on and so forth. If you look at the things we've written, I mean, I'm not Amnesty International, I can't do everything, I'm a single individual person..."
In fact there's only ONE place I read anything that mentioned the irony of the US bourgeoisie using the Ba'ath's cruelty towards the Kurds as an emotional justification for the war juxtaposed with the US's continuing support for Turkish slaughter of Kurds - which over the past decade has been much, much worse than in Iraq, where the Kurds have been left pretty much unmolested in the past decade (which of course, has been when the US has gone from arming the Ba'ath party to anatgonism with it). The part of the left that is concerned with the Kurds would not be concerned with "Hussein" at all, in fact, you mentioning the ancient problem of Hussein for the Kurds, and not mentioning the Turkish bloodbath they've been facing for the past decade shows not only your non-concern for the Kurds but your ignorance of what problems the Kurds are facing at all. And while we're on the subject of Chomsky, the person Frum accused of non-concern for the Kurds, he has been visiting Turkey regularly (and bringing a lot of attention to Turkey, of a type they don't want while trying to get into the EU) trying to help Fatih Tas, a Turkish publisher who was arrested by the Turkish government for publishing Chomsky's work detailing Turkey's campaign against the Kurds.
So while David Frum and Christopher Hitchens are in their ignorance trying to accuse people like Chomsky and "the left" of non-concern with the Kurds, he has been writing, and travelling, to try and help the Kurds in the countries where they are having problems now, not where they had problems a decade ago, and people reading Chomsky and the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review instead of whatever rag Hitchens is writing for now, they would know these things, and more importantly, how one can help the Kurds in 2003 instead of how to flagellate "the left" for their invented non-concern for Kurds.
-- Lance