Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World

While I always find Chomsky's books hard to read, they're always very informative and I always learn a lot from them. This book covers a lot of ground on the issue of US terrorism in the Middle East, and how we're told to see the actions of Middle Easterners as terrorism, even though they're mostly acting in self-defense against the atrocities of the US. Another book that makes me sad to be a citizen of a country that carries out such atrocities in the name of peacekeeping.

Devastating chapters detailing thought control by the establishment and media, US-backed Israeli terrorism and atrocities over the decades, the demonization and bombing of Libya, Iran-Contra, the US as a terrorist (or outright aggressor) state, criminality of the response to the Sep11 crime. Chomsky is widely viewed as a lunatic politically, but I'll be danged if he isn't mostly right. "It is only in folk-tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil." -- p 144.

Noam Chomsky's opening metaphor says that the SCALE of power is what semantically conditions how we scale our definitions of various acts of aggression by the different players.

"There is little here to surprise any honest student of history."

I concur.