Posted on 07/19/2004 10:36:51 AM PDT by To Hell With Poverty
Give Noam Chomsky credit for consistency. For nearly half a century, he has unfailingly praised the world's most brutal totalitarian regimes, even as he has slandered democracies. In 1970, Chomsky — a leading opponent of the Vietnam War — visited North Vietnam and wrote admiringly of the "high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels." The Hanoi leadership he termed "flexible and intelligent." Later in the 1970s, reports of the Khmer Rouge's bloody atrocities surfaced; the MIT linguistics professor dismissed them as products of "the U.S. propaganda system."
Chomsky has become one of the all-stars of the radical Left because he embodies that distinct vitriolic passion, the paranoia of the self-hating Westerner. He reserves his criticism mainly for America and Israel. The Middle East might achieve peace, he tells us, if not for Israel's commitment to "Jewish dominance throughout the region"; he references the "genocidal texts of the Bible" as sources of this Zionist drive for imperial rule. It's not too surprising that neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers are among his supporters.
His approach to current events is rife with bias and distortion. After 9/11, for example, he asked: "Why did [the terrorists] turn against the United States? Well, that had to do with what they call the U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia.... That's the home of the holiest sites of Islam." Never mind that the Saudis welcomed U.S. aid in defending against Saddam Hussein's 1990 aggression. Chomsky also avoids mentioning the homicidal intent articulated by America's Islamist enemies. His recommendation to America for ending global terrorism: "Stop participating in it."
Chomsky's words fall on receptive ears, particularly on liberal campuses across the nation. His influence is pervasive, and a systematic rebuttal is long overdue. It has now arrived: The Anti-Chomsky Reader is a masterpiece of Chomsky debunking. Editors Peter Collier and David Horowitz have assembled a collection of nine essays (by nine writers) refuting the aging professor's wildest claims.
"Today, as throughout his long career," writes Collier, "America's peril is Chomsky's hope." After terrorists murdered thousands of American civilians on 9/11, Chomsky fretted about a predicted "silent genocide" caused by U.S. retaliation in Afghanistan. He remains "committed to the idea that America had it coming for a history of misdeeds stretching back at least to 1812, the last time foreigners attacked the homeland, but really to 1492, where the nightmare began," according to Collier.
In an essay on the Vietnam War, Steven J. Morris of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins analyzes Chomsky's view of American imperialism. The U.S. effort in Vietnam, Chomsky alleged, was part of a "long-term effort to reduce Eastern Asia and much of the rest of the world to part of the American-dominated economic system"; anti-Communism was merely a convenient device for garnering support for the war. But, as Morris points out, Chomsky's contention was at odds with the facts. Chomsky's willingness to whitewash the Vietnamese Communists as earnest, idealistic peasants — as well as his studied avoidance of the terms "Leninist" and "Stalinist" — demonstrates that he was unwilling to face important truths about the ideological dimension of the Vietnam conflict.
In an essay on "Chomsky's War Against Israel," Paul Bogdanor contrasts Middle East reality with Chomsky's reverence for Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. It is "quite clear," wrote Chomsky in The Fateful Triangle (1999, foreword by Edward Said), that the PLO "has been far more forthcoming than either Israel or the U.S. with regard to an accommodationist settlement." Chomsky ignores the inconvenient truth that the PLO's charter still calls for "the liquidation of the Zionist entity economically, militarily, politically, culturally, and intellectually." Meanwhile, the bloody outbursts of PLO terrorists continue. Chomsky passes over these atrocities and points the finger at Israel, which, he says shares "points of similarity" with the Third Reich.
Since the 1960s, when he parroted Vietcong propaganda and ignored mass executions, Chomsky's star has continued to rise. Supporters of a freedom-based global order must contend with this intellectual spinmeister for hearts and minds around the globe. The Anti-Chomsky Reader performs a service to the whole world, by exposing Chomsky as one of the most damaging charlatans ever to ride the wave of campus adulation.
Chomsky thinks everyone everywhere is to conservative. Nader is more of a moderate to him.
EXACTLY. THAT WAS PART OF MY POINT.
One of the things people don't get about Chomsky is that he really is a warmonger who talks the pacifist talk.
MOST LEFTIST PACIFISTS ARE. THEY ARE FINE WITH ANY NON-CAPITALIST NON-CAUCASIAN GROUP WARMONGERING, RAPING AND PILLAGING TO THEIR COLLECTIVIST HEARTS' CONTENT.
BECAUSE, REMEMBER, IT'S EITHER YOUR SKIN COLOR OR YOUR IDEOLOGY THAT DETERMINE WHETHER YOU ARE GOOD OR BAD, NOT SOMETHING SILLY LIKE WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO...
If he had his way, we'd be invading every country on gods green earth and imposing socialist/communist systems, he would still blast us as being evil, but would (after stripping the military bare of course) involve us in every hell hole conflict on earth for "humanitarian" reasons.
AGAIN, EXACTLY.
I'd rather Hannity air these kooks.
Better to know your enemy than to not.
didn't you know? being a cunning linguist makes you a foreign policy expert! these same profs should want WF Buckley to be our national security advisor.
Chomsky is a classic example of a pernicious and improper appeal to the authority of a person outside their field of authority. Another classic example is when Roger Penrose tries to wax eloquent about his theories of artificial intelligence.
Unfortunately, this nasty fallacy is a chronic participant in many of the threads on FreeRepublic e.g. in the crevo and science discussions. Being an authority in one field does not confer authority in all possible fields no matter how smart that authority nominally is. Humans do love their idolatry.
all you have to do is say you hate America and you are a star in these circles
Chomsky only started to care about the East Timorese when his denials of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge came back to haunt him. After first denying that there was any atrocities, then trying to blame them on the United States and "counter-revolutionaries", and then minimizing them, he was finally forced to face the music when the widespread genocide committed by Communist forces was revealed. Rather than admitting he was wrong, he instead childishly tried to blame the news media for reporting the atrocities in the first place, and used the East Timor example in a desperate attempt to "prove" that the news media is an anti-communist lackey of the U.S. government.
He just gave the old grade school b.s. about "if you want to know, you should look it up".
He then just moved on, with a mumble about disagreeing.
It's mindboggling how intellectually corrupt college professors can be :-(
He is a brilliant mind. On politics, I believe him to be a mentally ill person. I don't know how that impacts on his linguistics. I believe him to be easily brilliant enough that his work has a big impact. But speaking as a philosophy buff, I think his orientation is too rationalist, very like a Bertrand Russell. He never bothered to take account of the insights of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
To quote someone else on the utility of reasoning from intuition: "Your intuition also tells you that the world is flat, that lead paint chips are tasty, and that everyone isn't as smart as you are. Your intuition is lying to you. It should make you wonder what your intuition is really trying to hide."
Here's a list of Phnom Chomsky's campaign donations:
http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_detail.php?city=Lexington&st=MA&last=Chomsky&first=Noam
Ha, two hundred bucks here, two hundred there....the cheap bastard, he's rolling in money!!
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