As today is the anniversary of Pearl Harbor (and others are remembering the occasion) I thought I should do some remembering. How about a couple of quotes that will live in infamy?

I read in the Times this morning an interview with Jeanette Rankin, who was the one member of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on December 8, 1941, to the accompaniment of a chorus of boos and hisses. Looking back, though, we can see that the Japanese had very real grievances, and that the United States had quite a significant share of responsibility in those grievances back in 1941.

-- Noam Chomsky, December 15, 1967

Why?

Because we're the EVIL EMPIRE; that's why! And on September 11, 2001, it was finally our well-deserved turn:

[9/11 is] a historic event because there was a change. The change was the direction in which the guns were pointed. That’s new. Radically new. So, take US history.

The last time that the national territory of the United States was under attack, or for that matter, even threatened was when the British burned down Washington in 1814. There have been many…it was common to bring up Pearl Harbor but that’s not a good analogy. The Japanese, what ever you think about it, the Japanese bombed military bases in 2 US colonies not the national territory; colonies which had been taken from their inhabitants in not a very pretty way. This is the national territory that’s been attacked on a large scale, you can find a few fringe examples but this is unique.

During these close to 200 years, we, the United States expelled or mostly exterminated the indigenous population, that’s many millions of people, conquered half of Mexico, carried out depredations all over the region, Caribbean and Central America, sometimes beyond, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines, killing several 100,000 Filipinos in the process. Since the Second World War, it has extended its reach around the world in ways I don’t have to describe. But it was always killing someone else, the fighting was somewhere else, it was others who were getting slaughtered. Not here. Not the national territory.

I can't accept a general and absolute opposition to violence, only that resort to violence is illegitimate unless the consequences are to eliminate a greater evil.

Which means war is sometimes justified.

(Now, if only I could figure out why Chomsky always finds himself on the side of the greater evil. . .)