Just kidding about the “if you want to” part.
When the booster-triumphalism of your bloodthirsty liberal friends gnaws at your conscience, there’s always the soul-scrubbing moral clarity of Noam Chomsky to vindicate you.
In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany.
I made this point earlier this week, and this is the first time I’ve seen it elsewhere since Jafar’s stamping out. And it’s important because we have a suspect tenuously linked to a crime, this account fully digested by populace at large, and a suspect summarily and extrajudicially executed with out so much of an iota of evidence.
Then of course, there’s Chomsky’s particular talent for applying universal morality to the blinders of American exceptionalism:
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
Unflinchingly moral, Chomsky will always ask the difficult questions that the rest of find too distasteful and lacking in due reverence. When wading through the brute celebrations of cruise-missile liberals and chest-thumping conservatives alike, the immutable, razor-like conscience of Noam Chomsky makes the political landscape a little less lonely.
With the passing of both Chomsky’s wife and Howard Zinn, I think it’s also clear that he doesn’t have a lot of time left with us. I hope for our sake it’s later rather than sooner.
