I ran across this interview with Chomsky recently. I really despise Chomsky in some respects – his academic authoritarianism (in a field near-and-dear to my heart, Linguistics) reveals no small hypocrisy behind his professed syndicalist anarchism. Nevertheless (or despite this), he sometimes makes some very good points about American hypocrisies, too. Perhaps this is in the vein of “it takes one to know one”? To quote from the interview (which was with the aptly-named Guernica magazine):
Noam Chomsky: Yeah, U.S. terrorism is often far worse because it’s a powerful state. Take 9/11. That was a serious terrorist act. In Latin America, they often call it “the second 9/11” because there was another one, namely September 11, 1973.
Guernica: In Chile.
Noam Chomsky: Suppose that al Qaeda had not just blown up the World Trade Center, but suppose that they’d bombed the White House, killed the president, established a military dictatorship, killed maybe fifty to a hundred thousand people, maybe tortured seven hundred thousand, instituted a major international terrorist center in Washington, which was overthrowing governments around the world and installing malicious dictatorships, assassinating people, [and] brought in a bunch of economists who drove the economy into its worst disaster maybe in history. Well, that would be worse than what we call 9/11. And it did happen, namely on 9/11/1973. All that I’ve changed is per capita equivalence in numbers, a standard way to measure. Well, okay, that’s one we were responsible for. So yeah, it’s much worse.
Yes, the other 9/11 was in 1973, in Chile. And it was brought to you by Nixon/Kissinger, in the person of Pinochet, not Osama bin Laden.
The other bin Ladens.
