…One Less Scene

For the most violent culture on earth, there sure are a lot of nice people here.

  “…Studying the relationship between the “West” and its dominated cultural “others” is not just a way of understanding an unequal relationship between unequal interlocutors, but also a point of entry into studying the formation and meaning of Western cultural practices themselves.” -Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993, p. 191.

“…new forms of domination will have to be devised to ensure that privileged segments of Western industrial society maintain substantial control over global resources, human and material, and benefit disproportionately from this control. …But it is an absolute requirement for the Western system of ideology that a vast gulf be established between the civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination, and the barbaric brutality of those who for some reason– perhaps defective genes– fail to appreciate the depth of this historic commitment, so well revealed by America’s Asian Wars, for example.” Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, 1982, p.84

“In 1996, half a million Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of the (UN) sanctions. Madeleine Albright, who was then U.S. ambassador to the Untied Nations, gave an infamous reply on May 12 that year when asked about sanctions on the CBS news programme 60 Minutes. Anchor Leslie Stahl put it to Albright: ‘We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?’ Albright’s reply: ‘I think  this is a very hard choice, but the price– we think the price is worth it.’” Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization, 2005, p. 704