

We Are All – Fill in the Blank - rndn
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/We-Are-All---Fill-in-the-Blank-20150110-0021.html

======
icebraining
Fun factoid: rms was a member of the advisory committee of this media
organization (TeleSUR). He left in 2010:
[https://www.stallman.org/archives/2010-nov-
feb.html#26%20Feb...](https://www.stallman.org/archives/2010-nov-
feb.html#26%20February%202011%20\(Telesur%20Propaganda\))

Of course, this is irrelevant in this case - they are just publishing
Chomsky's opinion.

------
thegeomaster
I'm Serbian, so this resonates very strongly.

To start off, here is an article by one of the journalists who survived the
attack: [1]. I'm not sure of his political affiliation and if he was pro-
regime or not (the regime at that time was undoubtedly evil), but the way of
writing about the tragedy really struck a chord, so it is very relevant. The
civilian casualty reports of the attack itself range between 489 and 528[2].

I was only 2 when the the NATO air invasion on Serbia started. At that time,
me and my parents were living in a remote town in Eastern Serbia and the main
targets were elsewhere. However, there was a factory of chemical compounds
near us that was rather high-profile, and they announced it will be targeted
soon, so as a precaution we fled to a nearby afer village where my
grandparents lived then. They say you usually don't remember anything before
the age of three, but there is one picture that I strongly believe came from
there. We were all in a basement, with some other people, crammed, and I think
I remember the sound of sirens or faint explosions somewhere, but maybe that's
just a fake memory. I remember an old, broken fridge in the corner, and when I
talked to my parents about this, they say that they remembered the same old
fridge in that basement that day.

Only later, when I grew up, I heard the stories of the Radio Television of
Serbia building being bombed and the circumstances surrounding it. I don't
know enough facts to know if that media outlet was censored and manipulated,
or if the director knew that the building will be targeted and left the
journalists there to be sacrificed so the regime could use that event for
propaganda later. But it doesn't matter in the end. All I know is that people
died---journalists who probably just did their job. Journalists who had to be
protected, but were instead hung out to dry. The media was most probably
censored (that's my perspective from today, but again I don't know most of the
facts), but I doubt that any of them had any say in that. The ones who were
responsible are higher-up officials.

Those were not the only civilians who died, as mentioned before. For instance,
my high school bears a memorial engraving in memory of an 18-year-old student
who died when a bridge collapsed near Varvarin[2].

The Yugoslav people from then never had any hate for anyone. It was amidst a
huge crisis and they mostly wanted just a better life. We were led by a
psychopathic leader who brought incidents like the killing of those
journalists and all these civilians. Somehow my country has never succeeded in
avoiding evil.

I'm not trying to belittle other incidents. All human deaths are scary and
sad. I am scared and sad when hearing about the Charlie Hebdo incident. But
it's hardly an isolated case. It seems to happen all the time, and people
should be more aware---maybe then, there is a chance of some change in the
world for the better.

And a small digression: I remember that PG, in a heavily technical essay that
I really liked, mentioned something rather political about Yugoslavia and
freedom for people's homelands. Such a political sentiment felt really out of
place, so I wrote to him about it---I never got a reply, but that's completely
understandable and beside my point here.

[1]:
[http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR304A.html](http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR304A.html)

[2]:
[http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm](http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm)

[3]: [http://emperors-clothes.com/misc/nota.htm](http://emperors-
clothes.com/misc/nota.htm)

------
dkarapetyan
One side says terrorist, the other side says freedom fighter. This distinction
has existed since the beginning of time depending on which side you've stood
on.

------
chroma
It is absurd for Chomsky to compare botched NATO bombings to the intentional
slaughter of civilians for blasphemy. He's been making this same argument for
decades. The recent atrocities in France are just another opportunity for him
to espouse it. Sam Harris addressed Chomsky's points in a section of _The End
of Faith_ called _Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of "Collateral Damage"_[1].
The difference in morals can be made obvious by asking: What would each side
do if they had the power to do whatever they wanted?:

 _What we euphemistically describe as “collateral damage” in times of war is
the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology.
To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts
would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons – weapons that allowed
us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at
any distance, without harming others or their property. What would we do with
such technology? ... A moment’s thought reveals that a person’s use of such a
weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics._

 _Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between
George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.) – in the
pages of writers like [Arundhati] Roy and [Noam] Chomsky, in the Arab press,
and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would George Bush have
prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have targeted
the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would
he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers?
Whether or not you admire the man’s politics – or the man – there is no reason
to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single
innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect
weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather
differently._

Another way to see the difference in ethics is to ask what would happen if the
roles were reversed:

 _Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed,
what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a
regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to
minimize civilian casualties? What are the chances that Iraqi forces would
have been deterred by our use of human shields? (What are the chances we would
have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American
government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide
bombers? What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing
a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily? You should
have, in the ledger of your imagination, a mounting column of zeros._

 _Nothing in Chomsky’s account acknowledges the difference between intending
to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we
call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to
capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”).
In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the
ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could
hardly be more distinct. Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life
of a child in jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a
principle we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance,
that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be
killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well.
So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools,
chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute
to the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable
deaths of children on our ski slopes as “skiing atrocities.” But you would not
know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter.
Body count is all._

The only reason the Charlie Hebdo attackers didn't kill more innocent people
is because they lacked the ability to do so. The only reason NATO forces kill
innocents is because soldiers make mistakes or occasionally go crazy.

1\. [http://books.google.com/books?id=V1NXG1ob-
WcC&pg=PA142&lpg=P...](http://books.google.com/books?id=V1NXG1ob-
WcC&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142#v=onepage&q&f=false)

------
VladJ
couldn't agree more

