We Are All Complicit (in US crimes in Timor, in Vietnam, in the Sudan)

[Karmadillo]

Look where passively allowing this crap to happen has gotten us. We have a criminal in the White House who got there as a result of election theft approved by a treasonous Supreme Court, the looting of the US treasury by the super-rich, an illegal war against Iraq, and a genuinely insane war on science at a time where our very existence depends on an accurate scientific understanding of our impact on the global ecosystem. If ever there was a time to organize and fight for genuine change, this is it.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=9379

We Are All Complicit
by Noam Chomsky

His substantive charges are as follows. To demonstrate "a particularly dishonest handling of source material," Kamm alleges that, Chomsky "manipulates a self-mocking reference in the memoirs of the then US ambassador to the UN… to yield the conclusion that Moynihan took pride in Nazi-like policies." The topic is Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor, condemned by the security council, which ordered Indonesia to withdraw, to no effect. Moynihan explains why: "The US wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The department of state desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success." He then refers to reports that within two months 60,000 people had been killed, "10 per cent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the second world war"—at the hands of Nazi Germany. His comparison, not mine, as Kamm pretends.

Atrocities continued through to the final paroxysm of violence in August-September 1999, until Clinton ordered a halt a few weeks later. Indonesia instantly withdrew, making it clear who bears responsibility for one of the closest approximations to true genocide of the postwar period.

According to Kamm, I "deployed fanciful arithmetic to draw an equivalence" between 9/11 and Clinton's destruction of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, which produced half of Sudan's medical supplies. The equivalence is, again, his fanciful construction. Discussing the "horrendous crime" committed on 9/11 with "wickedness and awesome cruelty," I mentioned that the toll may be comparable to the consequences of Clinton's bombing of the Sudan, about which I said nothing further. This single phrase was a considerable understatement, judging by the "fanciful arithmetic," which Kamm ignores. Among other sources I later cited were the German ambassador to Sudan, who wrote in the Harvard International Review that "several tens of thousands" died as a result of the bombing, and a similar estimate in the Boston Globe by the regional director of the Near East Foundation.

<edit>

To demonstrate my "central" doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that, "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent—or denazification." The context, which he omits, is a 1968 report in the New York Times of a protest against an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry where children could "enter a helicopter for simulating firing of a machine gun at targets" in Vietnam, with a light flashing when a hit was scored on a hut. This was a year after the warning by the highly respected military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction… … the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size."

more...

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. The father whose children died due to the sanctions placed on

Iraq and the resultant lack of medicine/vaccines, is now fighting us. He is a terrorist of the first order.

KICKED AND NOMINATED

Your name and its national significance, yes there is national karma.... and we are about to experience what it is... they drag us down with their visions of grandeur and world domination... there is a price to be paid, too bad everyone needs to pay and not just the perps.



Karma is an undeviating and unerring tendency in the Universe to restore equilibrium, and it operates incessantly.

[FloridaPat]

2. I've been thinking about that myself lately. I keep wondering

where is the justice in this world? And thanks to *, I have found out more about what my country has been doing the last 60 years than I cared to know. Justice would be the downfall of the US. We have destroyed so much and so many. And apparently all for oil.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

4. We have manipulated world events and affairs to our advantage

to no end.... and indigenous people be damned.

www.soaw.org

[acmejack]

3. I have not been complicit in a war crime or the other examples listed!

Since I was discharged from the military. With the exception of Vietnam, I have fought against all the other examples listed tooth and nail. It is difficult to equate that with complicity, at some point powerlessness must be a mitigating factor. I agree my Country has certainly been complicit, but it is hard to equate that with every individual here being involved.

If I had not spoken, marched, written, protested these acts, I would be much more willing to accept the blame. Other than an accident of birth, many of us have no involvement other than dissent with these crimes. That said Noam's point is well taken.

Am I simply trying to assuage my grantedly guilty conscience? I hope not, but...

[rman]

5. Democratic governments do these things in name of The People,

since it is the people who elect the governments.

So Chomsky is correct in principal.

I think our best excuse is that we don't really have democracy - though arguably we're ultimately responsible for that to. I mean, who else would be responsible?