WATCH: Chomsky Blasts
'American Sniper' and the Media that
Glorifies It
The famed professor draws a disturbing
parallel between "Sniper" and our "global
assassination program."
By Janet Allon
January 27, 2015 "ICH"
- "Alternet"
- Noam Chomsky had some choice words
about the popularity of "American Sniper,"
its glowing New York Times review, and what
the worship of a movie about a cold-blooded
killer says about the American people.
It's not good.
During a Cambridge, Massachusetts event
hosted by The Baffler, Chomsky first read
the glowing recent review the New York Times
gave the movie. That review begins
inauspiciously by insulting, “America’s
coastal intelligentsia, which has busied
itself with chatter over little-seen art
dramas while everyday Americans showed up en
masse for a patriotic, pro-family picture
which broke all attendance records in its
opening days.”
So, Chomsky wonders aloud: “What was the
patriotic, pro-family film that so entranced
everyday Americans? It’s about the most
deadly sniper in American history, a guy
named Chris Kyle, who claims to have used
his skills to have killed several hundred
people in Iraq.”
Kyle's first kill was a woman who
apparently walked into the street with a
grenade in her hand as the Marines attacked
her village. Here's how Kyle describes
killing her with a single shot:
“‘I hated the damn savages I’d been
fighting,’” Chomsky said, quoting Kyle.
“‘Savage, despicable, evil — that’s what we
were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of
people, myself included, called the enemy
savages. There was really no other way to
describe what we encountered there.’”
Chomsky also pointed out that The New
Yorker loved the film, saying, "it was
great, kept to the cinematic values, said it
was well done." On the other hand,
Newsweek's Jeff Stein, a former US
intelligence officer, deferred, calling it
appalling. In that review, Chomsky says,
Stein remembered a visit he had made to a
“clubhouse for snipers, where to quote him,
‘the barroom walls featured white-on-black
Nazi SS insignia, and other Wehrmacht regalia.
The Marine shooters clearly identified with
the marksmen of the world’s most infamous
killing machine, rather than regular
troops.”
“Getting back to Chris Kyle,” Chomsky
said, arriving at his larger point. “He
regarded his first kill as a terrorist —
this woman who walked in the street — but we
can’t really attribute that to the mentality
of a psychopathic killer, because we’re all
tarred by the same brush insofar as we
tolerate or keep silent about official
policy.”
“Now, that [sniper] mentality helps
explain why it’s so easy to ignore what is
most clearly the most extreme terrorist
campaign of modern history, if not ever —
Obama’s global assassination campaign, the
drone campaign, which officially is aimed at
murdering people who are suspected of maybe
someday planning to harm us.”
Chomsky recommends reading some of the
transcripts with drone operators, calling
them "harrowing" in their dehumanizing
treatment of people who are targeted.
The implication is clear and chilling.
Are we all, at least tacitly, American
snipers?
Here's Chomsky via WGBH below
