"I turned on the radio to find out what was going on," said one commentator, "obviously a horrible atrocity...I reacted pretty much the way people did around the world."
That's a common enough response, but then this particular observer went on to say, "Unless you're in Europe or the United States or Japan, I guess, you know it's nothing new. That's the way the imperial powers have treated the rest of the world for years.
"This is a historic event, but unfortunately not because of the scale or nature of the atrocity but because of who the victims were.
"If you look through hundreds of years of history, the imperial countries have been basically immune. There are plenty of atrocities, but they're somewhere else. And this kind of thing has been pretty common knowledge among people who pay any attention for years."
What this commentator points out is especially true of the U.S., which, excepting the offshore Japanese attacks of WWII at Pearl Harbor and Dutch Harbor, had not directly experienced any kind of warfare or attacks agaist civilians on its own real estate between 1865 and 9/11/01.
The commentator, of course, is Noam Chomsky, from his book "Power and Terror."
No comments:
Post a Comment