I've traveled extensively in Indochina and met people who lost their entire family to those 'uninteresting connections'. I'd love to see if you have the courage to say that to them.
I think the tl;dr of the article was that American policy has resulted in the most civilian deaths since 1945. No global conspiracy needed. Those number are out there for anyone who cares enough to research them.
I'd say that I agree with Noam quite often, Manufacturing Consent was awesome, but a lot of his talk of "elite interests" should really be focused more broadly on the West overall. The reason financiers did what they did was a government asleep at the wheel that we elected and a demand side wanting more and more assets for less and less.
Before we poke our fingers at the "elites", we need to see who else's interests drive Western hegemony - that may be a little less palatable.
Better, how is this something in the past we shouldn't be discussing anymore?
Our last president basically redefined the concept of 'unjust war'. We obviously haven't changed much from Vietnam War era politics.
My only real comment is that the 1945 cutoff is arbitrary and unfair. American policy at the end of WWII was to bomb as many Japanese civilians as it could. But I'm sure those numbers get skewed when you add in the wholesale killing of civilians the world in saw in WWII by other powers.
Chomsky and his sycophants often write excessively long treatises that attempt to tie everything together into one giant conspiracy.
While it is true that we are all connected, most of those connections are uninteresting, unintentional and unworthy of any news coverage whatsoever.
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