The famed professor draws a disturbing parallel between “Sniper” and our “global assassination program.”

It’s not good.

During a Cambridge, Massachusetts event hosted by The Baffler, Chomsky first read the glowing recent review the New York Times gave the movie. That review begins inauspiciously by insulting, “America’s coastal intelligentsia, which has busied itself with chatter over little-seen art dramas while everyday Americans showed up en masse for a patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days.”

So, Chomsky wonders aloud: “What was the patriotic, pro-family film that so entranced everyday Americans? It’s about the most deadly sniper in American history, a guy named Chris Kyle, who claims to have used his skills to have killed several hundred people in Iraq.”

Kyle’s first kill was a woman who apparently walked into the street with a grenade in her hand as the Marines attacked her village. Here’s how Kyle describes killing her with a single shot:


Subscribe or “Follow” us on RiseUpTimes.org. Rise Up Times is also on Facebook! Check the Rise Up Times page for posts from this blog and more! “Like” our page today. Rise Up Times is also on  PinterestGoogle+ and Tumblr. Find us on Twitter at Rise Up Times (@touchpeace).  Click here to help Rise Up Times continue to bring essential news you won’t find in the mainstream corporate media.


“‘I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,’” Chomsky said, quoting Kyle. “‘Savage, despicable, evil — that’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy savages. There was really no other way to describe what we encountered there.’”

Chomsky also pointed out that The New Yorker loved the film, saying, “it was great, kept to the cinematic values, said it was well done.” On the other hand, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein, a former US intelligence officer, deferred, calling it appalling. In that review, Chomsky says, Stein remembered a visit he had made to a “clubhouse for snipers, where to quote him, ‘the barroom walls featured white-on-black Nazi SS insignia, and other Wehrmacht regalia. The Marine shooters clearly identified with the marksmen of the world’s most infamous killing machine, rather than regular troops.”

“Getting back to Chris Kyle,” Chomsky said, arriving at his larger point. “He regarded his first kill as a terrorist — this woman who walked in the street — but we can’t really attribute that to the mentality of a psychopathic killer, because we’re all tarred by the same brush insofar as we tolerate or keep silent about official policy.”

“Now, that [sniper] mentality helps explain why it’s so easy to ignore what is most clearly the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern history, if not ever — Obama’s global assassination campaign, the drone campaign, which officially is aimed at murdering people who are suspected of maybe someday planning to harm us.”

Chomsky recommends reading some of the transcripts with drone operators, calling them “harrowing” in their dehumanizing treatment of people who are targeted.

The implication is clear and chilling. Are we all, at least tacitly, American snipers?

Here’s Chomsky via WGBH below.

http://youtu.be/5X30Gkp9FVs

WGBHForum

Published on Jan 23, 2015

During a public conversation prompted by the beginning of the Tsarnaev trial in Boston, Noam Chomsky discussed the larger issue of society’s growing tolerance for violence and willingness to overlook questionable acts carried out by government agencies. He refers to a review of the 2014 film, American Sniper as a way into the conversation about what we define as terror, when we feel justified in protecting ourselves and what the fallout is for taking violent action.

Hosted at The Lilypad in Cambridge, MA by The Baffler Magazine, featuring the ACLU’s Kade Crockford and linguist Noam Chomsky.

Loading

2 Comments

  1. The Fury of a Patient Man January 30, 2015 at 5:03 AM
  2. Jerry "Peacemaker" January 30, 2015 at 12:10 AM

    In “What Is Art”, a nonfiction book considered by Gandhi as Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Tolstoy asserted that real art must convey the highest spiritual thought and feeling on the Earth. American Sniper doesn’t even come close to Tolstoy’s criterion, and neither did “Silence of the Lambs”, an utterly disturbing, negative but “clever’ film which won the Best Picture Academy Award over Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July”.

Comments are closed.

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

Subscribe via email
Enter your email address to follow Rise Up Times and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 3,899 other followers

Loading

VIDEO: Militarism, Climate Chaos, and the Environment

END COLONIALISM

BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Archive

Categories