A Can of Beer is a Waste of $$

昨日、ビールを1缶飲んだけど、それぐらなら酔うわけもなく、もっと飲みたくなるだけでカネのムダ。

"Chomsky Reader"は最後の一章が残っている。すべてを書き写したいほどの力がある。

... We follow a [postwar] policy of what some conservative business circles outside the United States (for example, the Far East Economic Review) call "bleeding Vietnam." That is, a policy of imposing maximum suffering and harshness in Vietnam in the hope of perpetuating the suffering, but also ensuring that only the most harsh and brutal elements will survive. Then you can use their brutality as a justification for having carried out the initial attack.... We block aid from international institutions and we've succeeded in blocking aid from other countries.
For example, one of the side effects of the U.S. war against Indochina was that we pretty much destroyed the buffalo herds. This is a peasant society and buffalo are the equivalent of tractors, fertilizers, etc....
India tried to send, in 1977, one hundred buffalo, a very small number, to Vietnam to try to replenish these losses. We tried to block it by threatening to cancel Food for Peace aid to India if they sent the hundred buffalo. The Mennonites in the United States tried to send pencils to Cambodia; again the State Department tried to block it. They also tried to send shovels to Laos to dig up the unexploded ordnance. Of course, we could do it easily with heavy equipment, but that we are plainly not going to do. We didn’t even want to send shovels.
... So it was announced by [the Carter administration] with great fanfare and self-congratulation that we were sending a tiny quantity of rice; it was minuscule. Even that was a fraud. It turned out later that that amount of rice was simply deduced from a contribution to a United Nations program that was indirectly going to end up in Laos...
Carter, incidentally, once explained in a news conference what he was up to. This was in 1977, when he was giving one of his sermons about human rights. He was asked, what about Vietnam? And he said that we owe Vietnam no debt because the "destruction was mutual."... What is interesting and significant is that this statement aroused no comment. This statement is easily worthy of Hitler or Stalin, yet it aroused no comment in the United States among the articulate intelligentsia, press, or anyone else. It's just accepted that we owe Vietnam no debt because the "destruction was mutual." (pp. 325-326, Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences, 1985)

[The leading American specialist on human rights in Latin America, Lars Shoultz] asked how the human rights climate in a country was correlated with American aid. He chose a very narrow conception of human rights, what he called "anti-torture rights," that is, the rights to be free from torture by the government and so on. He found that there is a relationship between human rights and American foreign policy: namely, the more the human rights climate deteriorates, the more American aid increases.... To use his words, "Aid has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens," to the "hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights."
... [Edward Herman] compared American aid to changes in the investment climate, the climate for business operations, as measured, for example, by whether foreign firms can repatriate profits and that sort of thing. It turned out there was a very close correlation. The better the climate for business operations, the more American aid -- the more we support the foreign government. That gives you a plausible theory. U.S. policy is in fact based on the principle that human rights are irrelevant, but that improving the climate for foreign business operations is highly relevant... (p. 331, Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences, 1985)

Historian Yoram Nimrod writes that the background for this slaughter [on October 28, 1948, at Doueimah, an undefended town north of Hebron], and the general attitude of the time that "the Arabs and their possessions are fair game," can be traced to the attitudes of the leadership, who wanted the Galilee to be "free [literally, "clean"] of Arabs" and asserted that "for the Arabs of the Land of Israel there remains only one function: to flee" (David Ben-Gurion), that the country must be "homogeneous" and hence with as few Arabs as possible (Moshe Dayan), and who insisted that the Arab civilians who had fled or had been expelled "cannot and need not return" (Chaim Weizmann), or even be settled nearby, even if this means rejecting peace overtures (Ben-Gurion).
... Chaim Weizmann's principle was, incidentally, also followed in subsequent years, notably after the 1967 war when hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were expelled. A report by Eyal Ehrlich observes that "much was written, and with pride, about 'Operation Refugee' which permitted 17,000 to return," but not the fact, which he discovered in interviews with soldiers and officers, that the army was under orders, which it fulfilled, to kill returning refugees: "Civilians, women, children were killed. No one reported, no one counted the bodies, no one investigated and punished" these actions taken in pursuance of "policies established by such men as" Yitzhak Rabin (now minister of defense), Chaim Herzog (now president), and Uzi Narkis (commander of the Jordanian front, later head of the Department of Immigration and Absorption of the Jewish Agency, a bitter irony). Soldiers were ordered to shoot even if they heard "the crying of an infant." (p. 356, Nicaragua, 1986)
… The real reason to destroy the Sandinista regime can readily be explained…: by fear of Nicaraguan success. Reports on Sandinista social successes inspire real fear; unless tanks do not. The real reasons are based on the argument that President Wilson regarded as “unanswerable”: the interests of the people of Latin America are “an incident, not an end.” What is paramount is a narrowly conceived American interest: “The protection of our raw materials”… We must therefore become deeply concerned when some group becomes infected by the heresy detected by U.S. intelligence: “the idea that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people,” what U.S. political theology calls “communism” in our Third World domains, whatever the commitments of its advocates. (pp. 358-359, Nicaragua, 1986)

It is intriguing… to consider the interpretation of international law devised by advocates of the U.S. war against Nicaragua. Recall that the theory is that the United States is exercising the right of collective self-defense against Nicaragua’s armed attack upon its ally, El Salvador… Armed attack, in this conception, “includes assistance in organizing insurgency, training of insurgents, financing of the insurgency, use of facilities for command and control, ammunition and explosives supply, intelligence and communications assistance, logistics assistance, and political and propaganda support, as well as weapons supply”; thus voicing support for the Afghan rebels constitutes “armed attack” against Afghanistan, to which the USSR is “obliged” to respond by military force, by bombing offices of the U.S. press, for example. In the light of this concept, consider the CIA-engineered coup in Guatemala, the long U.S. terrorist war against Cuba, and innumerable other crimes. By the standard of apologists for U.S. atrocities, many an American leader should face the bar of justice for crimes against peace, much of the world would be permitted under international law, indeed “obliged,” to attack the United States in self-defense. (pp. 364-365, Guatemala, 1986)

けさ、6時まで眠れなかった。起きたら昼の2時だった。また、ダメ。