Jun
7
“The reasons why Reagan’s war on terror has been dispatched to the repository of unwelcome facts are understandable and informative — about ourselves. Instantly, Reagan’s war on terror became a savage terrorist war, leaving hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses in the wreckage of Central America, tens of thousands more in the Middle East, and an estimated 1.5 million killed by South African terror that was strongly supported by the Reagan administration in violation of congressional sanctions. All of these murderous exercises of course had pretexts. The resort to violence always does. In the Middle East, Reagan’s decisive support for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, was based on the pretense that it was in selfdefense against PLO rocketing of the Galilee, a brazen fabrication: Israel recognized at once that the threat was PLO diplomacy, which might have undermined Israel’s illegal takeover of the occupied territories. In Africa, support for the marauding of the apartheid state was officially justified within the framework of the war on terror: it was necessary to protect white South Africa from one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, so Washington determined in 1988. The pretexts in the other cases were no more impressive.”
Noam Chomsky, “The evil scourge of terrorism”: Reality, construction, remedy (via fyeahnoamchomsky)
