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metaxa
SteinHakkeToillat
Ble Medlem: 26 Apr 2003
Innlegg: 342
Bosted: Oslo
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 USAs utenrikspolitikk
http://cgi.omroep.nl/cgi-bin/streams?/rnw/amsterdamforum/030527chomsky.rm
Dette er en link til et radiointervju med Noam Chomsky som jeg anbefaler alle som føler seg litt forvirra av alt pratet rundt USAs utenrikspolitikk, og i grunn alle andre. Noam Chomsky er ekstremt velartikulert og ytrer sjeldent en setning uten å ha dokumentasjon i ryggen.
Hvis du foretrekker å lese intervjuet så finner du det her:
http://www.rnw.nl/amsterdamforum/html/030517ch_trans.html
Noen smakebiter:
ANDY CLARK
This email is from Don Rhodes, from Melbourne, in Australia, and he says: "I do not believe that the US wants to dominate the world. The Americans have been attacked on several fronts, 9/11 being only one of them. Someone has to bring into line rogue states and it is the USA alone that has the capability to do this. Without such a 'world policeman' the world would just disintegrate into warring factions. Look at history for examples of this." What do you make of that sort of statement?
NOAM CHOMSKY
The first sentence is simply factually incorrect. The National Security Strategy states fairly explicitly that the US intends to dominate the world by force, which is the dimension in which it rules supreme, and to ensure that there is never any potential challenge to this domination. That was not only stated explicitly, it has also been commented on repeatedly, right away in the main establishment - the Foreign Affairs journal in its next issue is pointing out that the United States is declaring the right to be what it calls a "revisionist state", which will use force to control the world in its own interests. The person who sent the email may believe that the US has some unique right to run the world by force. I don't believe that, and contrary to what was stated I don't think history supports that at all. In fact the US record, incidentally with the support of Australia, since the period of its global dominance in the 1940s, is one of instigating war and violence and terror on a very substantial scale. The Indochina War, just to take one example in which Australia participated, was basically a war of aggression. The United States attacked South Vietnam in 1962. The war then spread to the rest of Indochina. The end result was several million people killed, the countries devastated, and that's only one example. So history does not support the conclusion and the principle that one state should have a unique right to rule the world by force. That's an extremely hazardous principle, no matter who the country is.
ANDY CLARK
OK, another email. This is from Rijswijk, in The Netherlands, from M.J. "Bob" Groothand. This message says: "Throughout history some nations have always tried to rule the world. Most recently Germany, Japan and Russia come to mind. If the US is now the latest 'would-be conqueror' then we can thank our lucky stars. It would be done with decency and honour for all mankind. The fact is that nothing like this is being considered by Bush or the American government. You forget that the US has a constitution and, unlike Stalin, Hitler, Hussein and other despots, Bush is up for re-election in two years and American voters are not dumb nor are they oppressed or intimidated. It's a secret ballot." Will electoral accountability rein in the US government, do you think, as this listener suggests?
NOAM CHOMSKY
First of all, the account of history is mostly fanciful, but let's put that aside. The fact that a country has a constitution and is internally democratic does not mean that it does not carry out violence and aggression. There is a long history of this. England, for example, was perhaps the most free country in the world in the 19th century and was carrying out horrifying atrocities throughout much of the world, and the case of the United States is similar. The record goes back very far. The United States was a democratic country, for example, when it invaded the Philippines a century ago, killing several hundred thousand people and leaving it devastated. It was a democratic country in the 1980s, when the current incumbents in Washington carried out a devastating war of terror in Nicaragua, leaving tens of thousands dead and the country practically ruined, an attack for which they incidentally were condemned by the World Court and the Security Council in a veto-ed resolution, but then escalated the attack, and so it continues. As to the democratic election, yes, true, there is an election, and the Republicans have explained very clearly how they intend to overcome the fact that their policies are pretty strongly opposed by the majority of the population. They intend to overcome it by driving the country into fear and panic, so that they will huddle under the umbrella of a powerful figure who will protect them. In fact, we've just seen that last September when the Security Strategy was announced and the drumbeat of propaganda for war began. There was a government media propaganda campaign, which was quite spectacular. It succeeded in convincing the majority of the population that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of the United States. No-one else believed that. Even Kuwait and Iran, where they despise him, didn't regard him as a threat. They knew he was the weakest country in the region. It also succeeded in convincing probably the majority of the population that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, in fact instigated it and carried it out, and was planning further attacks. Again, there isn't a particle of evidence for this, and there is no intelligence agency or security analyst in the world who believes it.
ANDY CLARK
President Bush did say that in the very last weeks [before the war]. He started talking about a war of liberation.
NOAM CHOMSKY
At the last minute, at the Azores summit, he said that, even if Saddam Hussein and his associates leave the country, the United States is going to invade anyway - meaning the US wants to control it. Now, in fact, there is a serious issue behind this. It has nothing to do with liberating the Iraqi people. You might ask the question why Iraqis did not overthrow Saddam the way, say, Romanians overthrew Ceausescu... and so on through a long series of others. Well, you know it's pretty well understood. The westerners who know Iraq best - Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the heads of the UN oil for food programme - they had hundreds of investigators running through the country. They knew the country intimately, and they have been pointing out, as have plenty of others, that what has prevented any kind of uprising in Iraq is the murderous sanctions regime, which killed hundreds of thousands of people by conservative estimates, strengthened Saddam Hussein, and made the population completely reliant on him for survival. So the first step in allowing Iraqis to liberate themselves would have been to stop preventing it, by permitting the society to reconstruct, so that then they could take care of their own affairs. If that failed, if Iraqis were unable to do what other populations have done under the rule of comparable tyrants, at that point the question of the use of force might arise, but until they have been at least given an opportunity, and haven't been prevented by US-British action from undertaking it, we can't seriously raise that question, and in fact it was not raised by Britain and the United States during the build-up to war. The focus was on weapons of mass destruction. Just look at the record.
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky)
 Skrevet: Tir 06 Jul 2004, 18:12 |
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metaxa
SteinHakkeToillat
Ble Medlem: 26 Apr 2003
Innlegg: 342
Bosted: Oslo
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Dette er min favoritt.
ANDY CLARK
This is an email from Bob Kirk, in Israel. He says: "Why is Professor Chomsky so opposed to the spread of democracy and the liberation of most of the world's peoples (by the US if necessary, since the EU has abandoned challenging dictators), and what means other than persuasion and sometimes justifable force would he propose in order to liberate the unfree societies of the world?"
NOAM CHOMSKY
I would be strongly in favour of bringing democracy to the world, and I am opposed to preventing democracy. One of the reasons - it's very striking, if you look at the last few months - [is that] I have never seen, that I can recall, such clear and brazen contempt and hatred for democracy as has been expressed by US elites. Just have a look. Europe, for example, was divided into what was called Old and New Europe. There was a criterion - Old Europe were the countries where the governments, for whatever reason, took the same positions as the vast majority of their populations. That's called democracy. New Europe - Italy, Spain, Hungary - were the countries where the governments overrode an even larger percentage of their populations. The population was more opposed in those countries than in Old Europe, but the governments disregarded their populations - maybe 80 or 90 percent of them - and followed orders from Washington, and that's called good! Turkey is the most striking example. Turkey was bitterly attacked by US commentators and elites, because the government took the same position as about 95 percent of the population. Paul Wolfowitz, who is described as the great exponent of democratisation, a few weeks ago condemned the Turkish military for not intervening to compel the government to, as he put it, "help Americans", instead of paying attention to 95 percent of their own population. This expresses brazen contempt for democracy, and the record supports it. It's not that the United States is uniquely bad, it's like any other powerful state, but take a look at the record in the areas where the US has controlled the region for a long time - Central America and the Caribbean. It's about a hundred years. The US has been willing to tolerate democracy, but as they themselves put it, only if it is - I'm quoting from a Reagan administration advocate of democracy - "top-down democracy", in which traditional elites remain in power, elites that have been associated with the United States and run their societies the way the US wants. In that case, the US will tolerate democracy. They are very similar to other powerful states, but let's not have any illusions about it. The sender is writing from the Middle East, if I remember...
ANDY CLARK
From Israel.
NOAM CHOMSKY
...and there the United States has supported brutal, oppressive dictatorships for a long time, and it has known for a long time that that is the major reason for popular opposition. Back in the 1950s, we know from internal records, president Eisenhower discussed with his staff what he called the "campaign of hatred against us" among the people of the Middle East, and the reason was that the US was supporting oppressive and undemocratic regimes and blocking democracy and development because of our interest in controlling near-east oil. Well that continues until the present day. You hear the same thing from wealthy westernised Muslims interviewed in the Wall Street Journal at this very moment. There is a long record of opposing democracy, unless it is under control, and for reasons that are rooted in familiar great power politics.
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky)
Skrevet: Tir 06 Jul 2004, 18:15 |
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metaxa
SteinHakkeToillat
Ble Medlem: 26 Apr 2003
Innlegg: 342
Bosted: Oslo
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For de som synes dette var verdt å høre/lese, ta en titt på dette.
http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/teaching/op2004.html
Olof Palme Lecture 2004 ved University of Oxford i England:
PROFESSOR NOAM CHOMSKY gave Queen Elizabeth House's Olof Palme Lecture on 20 May 2004 in the Sheldonian Theatre on the subject of Doctrines and Visions: Who is to Run the World and How?
Det er 15 sider lang men ekstremt opplysende lesning.
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky)
Skrevet: Ons 07 Jul 2004, 03:29 Sist endret av metaxa den Ons 07 Jul 2004, 03:47, endret 2 ganger |
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metaxa
SteinHakkeToillat
Ble Medlem: 26 Apr 2003
Innlegg: 342
Bosted: Oslo
|
For de som synes dette var verdt å høre/lese, ta en titt på dette.
http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/teaching/op2004.html
Olof Palme Lecture 2004 ved University of Oxford i England:
PROFESSOR NOAM CHOMSKY gave Queen Elizabeth House's Olof Palme Lecture on 20 May 2004 in the Sheldonian Theatre on the subject of Doctrines and Visions: Who is to Run the World and How?
Det er 15 sider lang men ekstremt opplysende lesning.
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky)
Skrevet: Ons 07 Jul 2004, 03:30 |
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