Noam Chomsky's Take on "American Sniper"

let me begin with something that may seem pretty far afield a film review in The New York Times a couple days ago it begins out quoted by ridiculing America's coastal intelligentsia which is busied itself with chatter over little scene art dramas well everyday Americans showed up on mass for patriotic profoundly picture of which protocol attendance records in its opening days at the end of this quite laudatory review the reviewer mentions that there was another film that opened same time but with quite limited attendance Selma which was time for release with Martin Luther King Day well what was the patriotic profoundly filmed that so entranced everyday Americans is about the most deadly sniper in American history guy named Chris Kyle who claims to have used his skills to have killed with several hundred people in Iraq and he wrote memoirs and in the memoirs he describes what the experience was like so I'll quote Envy his first kill he said was a woman who walked into a street with a grenade in her and as the Marines attacked her village Katie Chris Kyle killed her with a single shot and explains how he felt about it I hated the damn savages I've been fighting savage despicable evil that's what we were fighting in Iraq that's why a lot of people myself included called the enemy savages that was really no other way to describe what we encountered there the film but a lot of the reviews I've seen the film incidentally but I read reviews of it someday very now the New Yorker thought it was great they kept the cinematic values it's well done nice photographs and so on there were others who found that appalling one of them was Jeff Stein he's a former US intelligence officer worked in Vietnam and he wrote a very critical review of keeping the content and he also recalled the visit that he made he was invited visit to a club at a Marine base to a clubhouse for snipers and quote him the barroom walls featured white on black Nazi SS insignia and other bare mock photos and regalia the Marine shooters clearly identified with the marksman of the world's most infamous killing machine rather than with regular troops well going back to Chris Kyle he regarded his first kill as a terrorist this woman who walked in the street with a grenade when the Marines were tagging her village but we can't really tribute that to the mentality of a psychopathic killer because we're all tarred with the same brush at least insofar as we tolerate or keep silent about official policy and that mentality is very little commentary about the sense of a lake so for Amnesty International ACLU and so on the mentality helps explain why it's so easy to ignore what is 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 some day planning to harm us if that's what they're suspected of doing in the morning sessions with Brennan and so on then we blow them away and I'd really advise you to read some of the transcripts of the drone operators they're hair-raising the guys who were sitting in front of computers you know in Las Vegas or somewhere I kept can't repeat it Obama may recall when he won the Nobel Prize said make no mistake evil does exist in the world and he's right you know it wasn't exactly where to find it

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 762,973

Keywords: Noam Chomsky (Author)

Id: 5X30Gkp9FVs

Length: 4min 56sec (296 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 23 2015