By Noam Chomsky, ZNet, Oct 20, 2010
The title of one of our earlier sessions was Cogito, “I think.” That may serve as a useful reminder that even more fundamental than the right of free expression is the right to think. And that has not gone unchallenged. Right here for example. I suppose the most famous case is that of Ismail Besikci, who has endured many years in prison on the charge of having committed “thought crimes.” And even worse, for having dared to put his thoughts into words, in his documentation of crimes against the Kurds in Syria, Iran, Iraq — and finally Turkey, the unpardonable offense.
I am sure you know the facts better than I do, so I will not review them. If this brave and honorable man had been suffering this ordeal in Russia, or Iran after the overthrow of the Shah, or some other enemy state, he would be internationally known and honored, and outrage about the savagery of his tormentors would know no bounds. But not in this case. One reason is that among his crimes is to have refused a $10,000 prize by the U.S. Fund for Free Expression in protest against Washington’s support for Turkish repression. Respectable people understand that this is a topic that “it wouldn’t do” to mention, to borrow from Orwell’s unpublished introduction to Animal Farm, which I mentioned yesterday. It certainly wouldn’t do to mention the fact that Clinton was supplying 80% of the arms as Turkish state terror in the southeast reached shocking levels through the 1990s, the flow increasing as the atrocities increased, peaking in 1997 when the US sent more arms to Turkey than throughout the entire Cold War period combined up to the onset of the insurgency. It particularly wouldn’t do to mention that in the same year, 1997, Clinton’s foreign policy entered a “noble phase” with a “saintly glow” according to a distinguished correspondent in the New York Times, his contribution to a chorus of self-glorification on the part of Western intellectuals that may well have no parallel in history. This disgraceful episode was a post-cold war contribution by the intellectual classes of the West to provide justification for expansion of NATO, and to provide some new pretext for intervention with the collapse of the traditional claim that the Russians are coming. Under the newly declared mandate, the self-designated “enlightened states,” directed by their noble leaders in Washington, must now discard the misguided “old anti-interventionist structure” instituted after World War II. They must be ready to act when they believe the cause to be just, and should not be “daunted by fears of destroying some lofty, imagined temple of law enshrined in the U.N. Charter’s anti-interventionist proscriptions.”
Peace and Justice Post 
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