Noam Chomsky and the Ants

Noam Chomsky, reviewing an article by Samantha Power, emblem of American liberals and US ambassador to the UN said:

A little more subtle, perhaps, is her observation that “if you continue to believe (as I do) that there is a moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective…”

Evidently, a crucial case is omitted, which is far more depraved than massacring civilians intentionally.  Namely, knowing that you are massacring them but not doing so intentionally because you don’t regard them as worthy of concern.  That is, you don’t even care enough about them to intend to kill them.  Thus when I walk down the street, if I stop to think about it I know I’ll probably kill lots of ants, but I don’t intend to kill them, because in my mind they do not even rise to the level where it matters.  There are many such examples.  To take one of the very minor ones, when Clinton bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility in Sudan, he and the other perpetrators surely knew that the bombing would kill civilians (tens of thousands, apparently).   But Clinton and associates did not intend to kill them, because by the standards of Western liberal humanitarian racism, they are no more significant than ants.  Same in the case of tens of millions of others.

Chomsky addresses the biggest issue that is being censored in all the liberal press: the collusion of liberal ideology with the total disregard for the lives of civilians in African and Middle Eastern countries for the sole purpose of geopolitical and economic supremacy. In self censored liberal talk, Samantha Power calls this the “pursuit of a military objective”. These civilians are not even worthy of being considered human, they are like ants, they simply do not matter to the greater and nobler task that we have been called on: our “military objective”. Technically speaking, but only in definition not in practice, this is not racism, as a race or ethnicity is not singled out by the liberal interventionist, yet it is only not racism because these civilians are not even deemed human enough for the liberals to even start thinking of their race: they look like ants on the war footage, they are like ants to the liberal ideology of geopolitical exceptionalism.

When I moved to the UK, one of the first things I was subjected to on British television was footage of the Gulf War. Many wars in the Middle East or Africa have followed since. Footage of British wars is usually aerial, the targets are visible as inanimate objects, usually buildings, but people are carefully edited out, or kept at such a distance as to not be noticeable as real people. The closest they  ever get on screen is the size of a small ant as viewed from a standing position. I do not think this mise en scène is accidental. I think it is carefully crafted to make sure that humans in foreign countries are to be viewed by the British public with no more empathy than we would look look at ants in those same foreign countries.

Our empathy and care and civil righteousness only stretches to the borders of our country, maybe to the borders of the EU, North America and Australia. Beyond these boundaries, if we need to assert our power or dominance, empathy stops. Humans become disposable ants. What matters then are “military targets”, “exceptionalism”, “existential threats” and so on. What does not matter in this zone are people, who they are, and what they want, as it may be diametrically opposed to what we want them to want. For the liberal mind there is the Western World, and an oil rich territory that stretches from Libya to Afghanistan which, according to our war footage, is inhabited only by ants. Of course, when other countries with different “military objectives” decide to fight the latest extremists that we have armed for our latest regime change war, this zone is suddenly inhabited by humans again, it is humans that miraculously happen to be targeted by their bombs and not ours. We are careful, they are not. We care, we do we really do, that’s why we don’t set out to “destroy civilians” in pursuit of our “military objective”, we just “kill civilians unintentionally”.

But what is the difference? Easy, they, the evil others, target humans, we only target ants. That is how we suddenly become morally superior. A game of substitutions, which as Chomsky points out, is on all levels, far more depraved than the racism that liberals profess that they fear like the plague. The real ethical threat to our contemporary society does not lie in a return to racial slavery and racism, it lies in the Western liberal ideology’s unwillingness to face the horrors of its exceptionalist doctrine.