#effroyables

  • Burkini Bans, New Atheism and State Worship: Noam #Chomsky on #Religion in Politics
    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37424-burkini-bans-new-atheism-and-state-worship-noam-chomsky-on-religion

    A drumbeat of propaganda on how “we are good” and “they are evil,” with constant exercises of self-admiration and abuse of others, can hardly fail to have an impact on perception of the world.

    Examples abound, but merely to illustrate the common pattern, take a current example from the peak of the intellectual culture: Samantha Power’s August 18 article in the New York Review of Books. Without any relevant qualification or comment, the author presents Henry Kissinger’s sage reflections on “America’s tragic flaw”: namely, “believing that our principles are universal principles, and seeking to extend human rights far beyond our nation’s borders... ’No nation... has ever imposed the moral demands on itself that America has. And no country has so tormented itself over the gap between its moral values, which are by definition absolute, and the imperfection inherent in the concrete situations to which they must be applied.’”

    For anyone with the slightest familiarity with contemporary history, such fatuous musings are simply an embarrassment — or to be more accurate, a horror. And this is not talk radio, but a leading journal of left-liberal intellectuals. People bombarded with patriotic drivel from all corners are likely to have a view of themselves and the world that poses major threats to humanity. It is hardly surprising in the light, both of the historical record and the self-images concocted by ideologists, that the US is ranked in international polls as the greatest threat to world peace, no one else even close. Nor is it surprising that the population is protected from such improper facts by the “free press.”

    #propagande #énormités #effroyables #Etats-Unis