Noam Chomsky is one of my favourite authors, I read him compulsively and frequently. He cuts through the cant and hypocrisy like no one else. One of the last books that I’ve read is Imperial Ambitions. Someone who hits the Anglo-American establishment as hard as he does can’t be all bad, n’est-ce pas?
At any rate, the following excerpt made me smile…that’s the Chomsky I know and love, that’s why I keep coming back for more!
Q: What do you make of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain being quoted on Nightline on March 31 saying, with regard to the attack on Iraq, “This is not an invastion”?
Tony Blair is a good propaganda agent for the United States. He’s articulate, his sentences hang together, apparently people like the way he looks. He’s following a position that Britain has taken, self-consciously, since the end of the Second World War. During the Second World War, Britain had been the world-dominant power, but the United States was going to become the dominant power after the war. Britain had to make a choice. Was it going to be just another country, or was it going to be what they call a “junior partner” of the United States? It accepted the role of junior partner. And that’s what it’s been since then. Britain has been kicked in the face over and over again in the most disgraceful way, and Blair sits there quietly and says, “We will be the junior partner.” We will bring to the “coaliton” our experience of centuries of brutalizing and murdering foreign people. We’re good at that. We’ve got centuries of experience in what Lloyd George called “bomb[ing] Niggers.” We’ll be the junior partner, and maybe in return we’ll get some privilege. And that’s the British role. It’s disgraceful. [Emphasis added and footnotes omitted.]
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