Distorted Morality: America’s War on Terror? – Chomsky 2002

Distorted Morality: America’s War on Terror?
Noam Chomsky – Delivered at Harvard University – February 2002

[excerpted]

…the hypocrite is the person who applies to others standards that he refuses to apply to himself. So if you are not a hypocrite you assume that if something is right for us then it’s right for them and if it is wrong when they do it, it is wrong when we do it. That is really elementary and I assume that the President would agree and all of his admirers as well. So those are the principles that I would like to start with.

…unless we can rise to that minimal level of moral integrity we should at least stop talking about things like human rights, right and wrong, and good and evil, and all such high afflatus things because all our talk should be dismissed, in fact, dismissed with complete repugnance unless we can at least rise to that minimal level. I think that’s obvious and I hope there would be agreement on that, too.

…let me formulate a thesis. The thesis is that we are all total hypocrites on any issue relating to terrorism. Now, let me clarify the notion “we.” By “we,” I mean people like us — people who have enough high degree of privilege, of training, resources, access to information — for whom it is pretty easy to find out the truth about things if we want to. If we decide that that is our vocation, and in the case in question, you don’t really have to dig very deep, it’s all right on the surface. So when I say “we,” I mean that category. And I definitely mean to include myself in “we” because I have never proposed that our leaders be subjected to the kinds of punishment that I have recommended for enemies. So that is hypocrisy.

…what is terrorism? Got to say something about that. That is supposed to be a really tough question. Academic seminars and graduate philosophy programs and so on — a very vexing and complex question. However, in accordance with the guidelines that I mentioned, I think there is a simple answer, namely, we just take the official U.S. definition of terrorism. Since we are accepting the pronouncements of our leaders literally, let’s take their definition. In fact, that is what I have always done. I have been writing about terrorism for the last twenty years or so, just accepting the official definition. So, for example, a simple and important case is in the U.S. army manual in 1984 which defines terrorism as the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature.

…what they called state-supported international terrorism a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself” in a “return to barbarism in the modern age” — I’m quoting [Secretary of State] George Shultz who was the administration moderate. The other guideline is that we will keep to the moderates, not the extremists.

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