This is a rather long entry, which starts in one place and ends in another, so hold off on the flames until you read the whole thing.
Noam Chomsky replies to Christopher Hitchens’ op-eds on The Nation’s web site from the past couple of weeks. Hitchens called Chomsky out for comparing the WTC attack to Clinton’s cruise missile attack on Sudan. Chomsky’s line of argument is that factoring in the secondary effects of the attack on the Sudanese (due to the shortage of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals), the casualties are, in terms of proportion of population, as bad or worse than ours.
He doesn’t provide numbers on the secondary Sudanese casualties, but quotes several mainstream sources reporting that the loss of the plant will hurt Sudan. It’s also true that the US blocked an UN investigation of the incident, so we don’t have reliable way to count the second order casualties of that attack.
I think Chomsky’s abstracted himself away from the outrage. To him, the attacks were just another exchange of fire in a long-running war.
Hitchens thinks the attacks were not a reprisal for any particular thing we’ve done in the Middle-East, but an attack on us for who we are: a homogenous crowd of unbelievers listening to rock’n'roll, playing Halflife, and having a generaly okay time.
I was having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that someone would murder people wholesale because they don’t like our lifestyle, and then remembered the militant elements of the Christian Right. They hate us for nearly the same reasons as the militant Muslims, and they are terrorists as well. They kill doctors and bomb womens’ clinics, Olympic Games, gay, and lesbian bars.
The number of people murdered by the militant wing of the Christian Right is tiny, compared to what was done at the WTC and the Pentagon, however, it does stand as a demonstration that a hatred born out of a kind of religious belief which divides people into the righteous and the heathen can drive a person to murder.
Update:
A reader wrote asking why I didn’t account for the role of the Catholic and Lutheran churches during the Holocaust, or lynchings by the KKK. To clarify, I was thinking of deaths in the past quarter century or so, attributable by individuals and groups associated with the millitant wing of the Christian Right.
I don’t know the history of the Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany during the rule by Hitler and the Nazi party. But some historians say that they were a direct party to the crime. I think the book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, might talk about that question.
