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Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World
By Noam Chomsky. New York: Claremont Research & Publications, 1986. 174 pp. $17.95
Do words mean what they say? Lawyers sometimes argued they didn't, especially when awkward facts stymied their clients. Then legal doctrine said they meant what they were ordinarily taken to mean. Lewis Carroll's Alice had them mean whatever she wanted them to.
Now comes a passionate denunciation by Noam Chomsky of hypocritical verbal sleight-of-hand employed by the United States government in the Middle East. Chomsky's Pirates and Emperors relates a story of St. Augustine, in which Alexander the Great berates a captured pirate for molesting commerce on the sea. The pirate argues that he is labeled a thief only because he employs a little ship in his plundering while Alexander, using a great navy, is called an Emperor. Chomsky depicts Emperor/United States employing large-scale violence in the Middle East righteously according to its current ideological values, while denouncing Arabs, especially Palestinians, as "terrorists" for committing lesser crimes.
Chomsky fully documents the dark thought that just as surely as someone dreams up a chamber of horrors, someone else puts it into actual...