Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
4. Defense Against the Great Satan: The Doctrine and
the Evidence
4.1 Defending the National Territory
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
296
hat are the reasons for the dedicated march towards
destruction and the irrelevance of public opinion, feasibility of
alternatives, or security concerns? There is a conventional
answer: We must defend ourselves against what President Kennedy
called the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy”; from “the focus of evil
in our time,” “the men who say . . . there is no God” with whom we
therefore cannot “compromise,” in the words of our own Khomeini, who
believes that our generation may see the Day of Judgment prophesied in
the Bible. 44 W
Thus at the two extremes of the spectrum of American
politics we have essentially the same answer: we must be very strong to
defend ourselves against the Empire of Evil.
This conventional answer is uninformative. In the technical sense of
information theory, the claim that we are defending ourselves from some
Great Satan conveys no information, because it is entirely predictable:
every action of every state is justified in defensive terms, so the fact that
these actions of this state are justified in terms of defense tells us no
more than that we are listening to the spokesperson for some state.
Thus, Hitler took the Sudetenland, invaded Poland and conducted the
Holocaust for defensive reasons: Czechoslovakia was a dagger pointed at
the heart of Germany, terrorists were killing innocent Germans, the Poles
stubbornly refused to make peace, Germany had to defend itself against
the Jews conspiring with the Bolsheviks and Western capitalism, and so
on. There is virtually nothing that has not been rationalized in the name