Excerpts from 9-11 by Noam Chomsky

The West is quite ecumenical in its choice of enemies. The criteria are subordination and service to power, not religion.

When a federal building was blown up in Oklahoma City, there were calls for bombing the Middle East, and it probably would have happened if the source turned out to be there. When it was found to be domestic, with links to the ultra-right militias, there was no call to obliterate Montana and Idaho.

A U.S. backed army took control of Indonesia in 1965, organizing the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, in a massacre that the CIA compared to the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. The massacre, accurately reported, elicited uncontrolled euphoria in the West, in the national media and elsewhere. When Nicaragua finally succumbed to the U.S. assault, the mainstream press lauded the success of the methods adopted to “wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deady proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves,” with a cost to us that is “minimal,” leaving the victims “with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations, and ruined farms,” and thus providing the U.S. candidate with “a winning issue”: ending the “impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua” (Time). We are “United in Joy” at this outcome, the New York Times proclaimed.