I'd urge anyone else planning to make any more comments on the "civilized" thread to re-read the passage in the Chomsky interview first.
To clarify:
1) No one - Chomsky or anybody on the list - implied the war was civilized.
2) No one implied the US or its government was civilized enough, or as civilized as we'd like it to be.
3) No one said the US was "the most civilized nation" or more civilized than other nations. The contention was that the US was more civilized than it had been in the *past.*
4) It is kind of OBVIOUS that neither Noam Chomsky nor anyone who posts regularly to a left listserv would agree with points 1-3. It's also kind of obvious that NC does not hold some racist idea of what a civilization is.
5) Chomsky - and those of us inclined to agree with him - never said progress was automatic or inevitable. His point was that social movements in this country had had some success in improving the place.
Finally, I think it's actually an crucial question, how the US is both more civilized than it used to be, and how it is not, because the question is really about how has the left succeeded, and how have we failed. We have failed to create a world in which workers and citizens have more power than capital - quite the reverse, because capital is in fact more powerful than it used to be. The working class has gotten much weaker. In that sense, the US is much less civilized and more profoundly barbaric than 40 years ago. That's something I and many (perhaps most) people on this list spend much of our time trying to figure out how to change.
But in the ways that Chomsky and others were talking about -- the position of women, tolerance for sexual diversity, less Jim Crow-type racism, more awareness of human rights, more people more easily mobilized to fight for social justice and protest the government, the way parents (especially fathers) relate to their kids, awareness of environmental issues -- it is indeed incomparably more civilized. That took lot of work, and the people responsible deserve a lot of credit. Those things are not easily dismissed, and they affect the everyday existence of almost everybody who lives in the US. If we didn't have such victories to point to, to show that social movements do change things, why would we join them? Better to accept the way things are and help individuals (volunteer in soup kitchens) or get on America's good side (become as obscenely rich as possible).
Liza