Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

CONCLUSIONS
In his renowned Pirates and Emperors (1986), the American left-wing
intellectual Noam Chomsky (1928- ), an internationally acclaimed linguist and
foremost critic of American imperialism, imported ancient piracy into the
twentieth century and used it as a basis for analyzing contemporary western
perversions of terrorism. In the preface to the first edition of his book,
Chomsky began the text with the anecdote of a pirate captured by Alexander
the Great as told by St. Augustine, the Algerian theologian of the 5 th century, in
The City of God. 1 When Alexander asked the pirate, “How dare you molest the
sea,” the pirate replied, “How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it
with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are
called an emperor.” 2 Chomsky’s point of view is clear: in contemporary
western usage, ‘retail terrorism’ of individuals and groups serves as an
ideological cover for true terrorism, namely violence and wholesale terrorism
perpetrated by the mighty western states, particularly the United States, against
weaker countries. 3
1 Silverstein, Paul A. “The New Barbarians,” p. 182.
2 Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World, 2 nd
edition (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002), p. vii.
3 Ibid.
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