Come on, Choamsky is the ultimate "america bad" man. He practically invented it.
"America bad" people are also "Russia not so bad" people. These are highly valuable people for Russia propaganda, of course. They're literal useful idiots.
Seriously. I am actually quite a fan of Chomsky, but he is reflexively America bad. You always always have to take what he says with the massive pillar of salt that his default position on everything geopolitics/IA related is "America Bad".
Out of interest, why would you be a fan of a person who is that flawed? Don't you think that their other stuff could also have shortcuts and dishonesty in there?
I do not think there has been anybody ever who doesn't take such shortcuts in their thinking. (that includes me!) As such it isn't a useful criteria for deciding if I should be a fan. Some people do it a lot more than others, and so I will eventually stop listening to those people as I realize I cannot stand it, but it isn't an automatic deal breaker to see it.
He is definitely not a "moral absolutist" in that he can avoid his own biases and habits. That too is a non-existent kind of individual / moral system that no one really is.
He’s right on that though. I lived through desert storm and the invasion of Iraq. The US targeted our civilian infrastructures in the first two weeks of the war. Virtually we had no electricity for nearly 5 years until the “food for oil” was agreed in 95. I have worked on the Haditha documentary for Nick Broomfield, you can watch it to witness the brutality of the US. Russia is bad, but when compared to the US, pretty much a saint.
Oh you’re talking about the First Gulf War started by Iraq invading and conquering Kuwait and the bombing campaign freed Kuwait as an independent country, destroyed Iraq’s civilian massacring Scud missiles, and left Iraq intact?
> Chomsky explained that he was not only referring to the fact that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in Iraq: "I am not only referring to this, it is obvious." UN inspectors had to be withdrawn as soon as the invasion of Iraq began, he says, "because the attack was so severe and extreme ... This is the American and British style of war." Chomsky adds: “Let's look at the victims. I only know the official numbers… the official UN numbers are about 8,000 civilian casualties [in Ukraine]. How many civilian casualties were there when the US and Britain invaded Iraq?”
The implications here are clear what he meant. Everything else in that headline is spin. This feels exaggerated IMO
He’s wrong and full of shit. America is responsible for like 5% of the civilian casualties in Iraq, Russia’s killed like 500,000 people, and they rape everyone they can see.
Moral relativism with geopolitics is cheap pseudo-intellectual play. America may not be perfect but we are definitely the good guys compared to Russia or China
Regardless of whether it's true or not, the fact that this is what he has to say about this invasion is what I find troublesome. Is it so hard to condemn it? Sounds like a diversion, to get away with not condemning it. But he doesn't have to choose, it's just bad faith. How long will we hear "but, what about Hiroshima?" any time a dictator goes for a land grab?
> Maybe this is because you are ignorant to the extent of American war crimes?
I think you may be ignorant to the extent and type of crimes that Russia is committing in Ukraine.
>> “There are examples of cases where relatives were forced to witness the crimes," he added. "In the cases we have investigated, the age of victims of sexual and gendered-based violence ranged from 4 to 82 years."
- Battle of Okinawa (and just the habit of American soldiers on Okinawa to rape and kill the locals in general)
- No Gun Ri massacre, Korea
- The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam
- My Lai massacre, Vietnam (really, most of the Vietnam War and Korea. Americans really do like killing Asians in the most violent and horrible ways it seems.)
- Haditha, Iraq (and arguably the entire Iraq war, which was waged under false pretenses to redirect American bloodlust after 9/11 towards the neocons' existing goals to "democratize" the Middle East and distract the public from Saudi involvement in the attacks.)
- Abu Ghraib as a runner up just because stacking pyramids of naked, tortured prisoners of war is just kind of banal compared to everything else.
Now does any of this mean other countries also don't commit war crimes? No. But the US has arguably committed more war crimes than any other country, going back to the continent-wide genocide against the natives. Is this because the US is more evil than all other countries? Subjectively, yes, but I would argue that the US as a nuclear superpower simply has no external limit on its capacity to commit war crimes and therefore commits the most simply because it can get away with it. If other countries were in America's shoes, they would probably be committing war crimes just as often.
It's not a war crime, but slavery and the genocide of Native Americans was not super great either. Doesn't count if you do it within your own borders!
Outside of strictly defined "war crimes", we have a very long history of interventionism, imperialism, support of coups, installation and support of dictators, overthrow of governments, military actions with foreign nations to install our own form of government / economy / morality. We've destabilized whole regions and nations, birthed massive terrorist organizations, overthrown countries, annexed territories and sovereign nations, and we continue to invade any nation that doesn't have nukes with our special forces (or to support foreign special forces) to attack targets of value.
Stalin was a mass-murdering fuckhead, for sure. But the USSR's actions look a whole lot like the New Imperialism every other major nation has been practicing since the 19th century. Putin is a new Stalin, for sure. But in the time between Stalin and now, we, the USA, have pulled wayyyyy more heinous shit on the world than Russia has.
i dispute it because fundamentally the entire notion of some war being fought in a noble way relative to another is heinous. as though there are good wars which aren't so bad and the soldiers behave themselves. chomsky perpetuating the harmful myth of comparative "goodness" of wars alone is enough to indict his capacity for real thought and compassion, however in the context of the life he's lived and his personality, it goes a little deeper than that. he's using this fantasy of there being "worse wars" as a vessel of reactionary rhetoric. he has taken the worst thing man does and appropriated suffering as leverage for academic blustering. he's far from unique in this aspect, but that's not the point, now is it? this level of soulless disregard for the horrors of reality and willful naivete in an effort to maintain appearances of trite political dogmas is certainly precluded from having any kind of meaningful opinion on morality or ethics, full stop. it's an indication that he simply lacks the intellectual capacity along certain dimensions to even come to grips with the fundamentals.
Though this topic's domain is beside what I wrote; what is on the other end of said force does not matter. The moral burden is not alleviated because it stands in contrast of goodness from the same action. To kill is to kill. To enact terror through rape, pillaging and demolition cannot be washed away. They exist simultaneously to any hypothetical goodness and the two of them taken together cannot be reduced to a single value.
A life of no evil cannot be perpetuated from will alone. It can be lived, and possibly perpetuated in extremely narrow likelihoods, but not through force of will. If you would like to complain that this suggests it is unfair if you are to survive in this world, yes. Though I wouldn't call it unfair. Consider this, if it's a function of luck, it is truly the most fair thing of all. Far more than if it were simply left up to will, which gives a discriminatory advantage to those with better skills of utilizing and applying their will.
You simply need to accept that through your actions, you will not just be performing good things. You can certainly pursue a higher good, however if done carelessly this entails higher evils shifting into lock-step behind you.
I like to think of it like a system of feedback loops. A naive pursuit of lofty moral heights naturally creates a vacuum in its wake, where whorls of moral lows collect and aggregate. The reverse also holds true. Should we accept evil being done because it will spawn a great good to balance things out? Paying the cost up front. I find the idea no more absurd than the supposedly logical inverse. Perhaps the ultimate good was not to fight a war, but to recognize its increase in likelihood and defend against evil's manifestation in the first place in a less reactionary way. Failing to do this, we are left with a moral debt to pay. Playing games of gods and devils so to speak, it's like a finger trap puzzle. The more you struggle, the tighter you become bound.
"America bad" people are also "Russia not so bad" people. These are highly valuable people for Russia propaganda, of course. They're literal useful idiots.