Quite honestly, he was kind of the same on the Balkans and western intervention there in the 90s. He sided with the Serbian government against the US when we bombed to stop the Kosovar portion of the Yugoslav war, despite the fact that indeed, the Serbian government, which had control of the Yugoslav army, a more powerful force than the KLA and had previous aided in acts of genocide in Bosnia. Albanian Kosovars asked for our help in that case, and I think it did stop things from getting to the level that they did in Bosnia. This isn’t to say that NATO wasn’t problematic in these wars, but there had been so much slaughter up to that point (with the Serb and Croat militias engaging in much of the violence that has been deemed genocidal), something had to be done. It’s unfortunate that Chomsky is just entirely dismissive of the Albanian Kosovar perspective because the US came in on their side. I honestly think that if we had not bombed in Serbia proper, there would have been far more of a body count, especially among Albanians.
I’d suspect that much of the same calculus is at play when he discusses the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His primary focus tends to be on American imperialism, and rightfully so. It’s a powerful force in geopolitics. But I also think he tends to dismiss local actors in these situations far too easily. Sometimes the US decision to intervene as the major military power isn’t always entirely based on self-interest, but also listening to locals - it’s true that it’s the ones who we know will cooperate with our self-interest get our ear more often than not. But sometimes it’s the local actors who are driving decisions and that’s just something that Chomsky can miss at times in his analysis of power and how the US wields it.
That Russia has become yet another neoliberal state not all that unlike the U.S., with an elite class that’s happy as long as they’re getting richer, and where the rest of the people are basically invited to go fuck themselves?
I’m with Chomsky on this one, but I’d say that they weren’t necessarily that before 2016. Very dangerous, yes, but the election created a perfect storm that has vaulted them to the number 1 spot at the moment. Like a strain of plague suddenly becoming much more virulent.
No, I mean I DO that all the time, make a comment that someone else made because I didn’t read the whole thread, first. People do sometimes make the same point I did for the same reason… we should all just read the thread to the end!
I know they put a shitload of effort into being the ones to do it first, but come on… I’ll tell you what’s responsible for nukes - physics, and human nature.
This video has him making basically the same argument, in case anyone prefers it that way:
I don’t see much to disagree with in what he says there, personally. It appears to be a defensible argument, at the very least.
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“To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
