And opened to a random page
which was “xi” of Arundhati Roy’s foreword
to the re-issue of Noam Chomsky’s
For Reasons of State
She writes:
Perhaps this belief in its own divinity
also explains why the U.S. government has conferred
upon itself the right and freedom to murder
and exterminate people for their own good.
When he announced the U.S. air strikes against Afghanistan
President Bush said, “We’re a peaceful nation.”
He went on to say
“This is the calling of the United States of America,
the most free nation in the world,
a nation built on fundamental values,
that rejects hate, rejects violence, rejects murderers, rejects evil.
And we will not tire.”
The U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation:
the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands,
and following this,
the kidnapping and enslavement of millions
of black people from Africa to work that land…
Genocide and slavery provide the social and economic underpinning
of the nation whose fundamental values
reject hate, murderers and evil.
adapted from Arundhati Roy, “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky”
At the conclusion of her essay, she writes:
“As a could’ve been gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential gook,
hardly a day goes by, when I don’t find myself thinking –for one reason or another–
‘Chomsky Zindabad.'”
