[Dean's World] Dave Price: Noam Is At It Again

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Noam Is At It Again
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1147712256.shtml


   [1]Noam Chomskyâs perspective always fascinates me, because heâs
   always struck me as the embodiment of a line from the old Aeon Flux
   series âThis is what happens when a great deal of intelligence is
   invested in ignorance.â While brilliant in various fields, his
   political views seem rooted in deeply flawed ground.
   Noam [2]makes the point, not unreasonable on its face, that the
   invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan violated the principles articulated
   at Nuremberg, where aggression was outlawed. But itâs easy to forget
   the Allies themselves violated these principles, by invading Germany
   even after the Germans had made overtures toward negotiating a peace
   (an idea supported by [3]Neville Chamberlain, among many others), and
   demanding Japanâs unconditional surrender rather than a negotiated
   withdrawal from Asia leaving Japanese sovereignty intact: in other
   words, they didnât treat the Axis as Iraq was treated in 1991. Our
   forefathers, having witnessed the unimaginable horror of WW I followed
   by the even greater holocausts of WW II, had concluded some regimes
   simply could not be left in power, regardless of the additional lives
   removing them would cost. (Did they dare hope, as they rewrote their
   constitutions to make them liberal democracies, that Japan and Germany
   would be pacifist states six decades hence? Probably not; they merely
   implemented what they saw as the only available solution.)
   I think itâs important too to realize the Allies were rather cavalier
   about their treaties, which supposedly forced Britain and France to
   declare war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, as the treaties
   inexplicably did not elicit such a response to the concomitant Russian
   occupation of the same country. France was even less serious about its
   obligations than Britain, barely fighting Germany at all, to the point
   that that conflict in the Saar specifically and the wider lack of
   action until the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and
   Luxembourg generally was derided as the â[4]Phony War.â Following the
   cessation of hostilities, Poland became a Soviet satellite; the
   supposed crux of the Allies casus belli, the restoration of Polish
   sovereignty, was never accomplished, and thus that entire rationale
   for war can be viewed as more or less fraudulent.
   What can we gather from the above? Simply put, the Allies did not go
   to war for any reasons of treaty, mutual defense, or international
   law, all of which principles they [5]freely ignored when it was more
   pragmatic to do so. They went to war with Hitler in 1939 for the same
   reason the U.S. went to war with Saddam in 2003: as a preventive and
   humanitarian measure, to remove an odious megamurdering regime bent on
   expanding its terroritory through military conquest and to counter a
   perceived future threat. Yet very few who protest the Iraq war today
   would argue the Allies were wrong to do so.
   Which brings us back to Chomsky. When one [6]does not believes that
   liberal capitalist democracy is, from a humanist perspective, a
   superior system (an assertion supported by [7]vast evidence), but
   instead embraces socialist anarchic modes of governance (on the basis
   of essentially no evidence), it radically alters the moral calculus of
   oneâs views of world politics. One can no more correctly evaluate the
   morality of international actions from such a fundamenatlly flawed
   perspective than one could accurately determine the area of a circle
   under the assumption pi = 10. Thus, predictably, we see obvious moral
   mistakes from Noam, such as endorsing Communist mass murderers during
   the Cold War, and this week [8]cuddling up to Hizbollah terrorists
   while criticizng terrorists: from Noamâs perspective, these partiesâ
   use of force is little different than Americaâs or Israel's.
   The reasons nations apply force matter, as does how they handle the
   occupation and aftermath; freedom and democracy are not mere
   linguistic constructs to rationalize aggression. The moral distinction
   betweem wars undertaken to establish or defend liberal democracy and
   those undertaken for the aggrandizement of dictators, the extension of
   their oppression to new populations, or the annihilation of a neighbor
   state is, fortunately, obvious to almost everyone with the slightest
   grounding in reality.

References

   1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky
   2. http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=05120615540
   3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
   4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phony_war
   5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal
   6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Noam_Chomsky
   7. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/
   8. http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1136