Posted on 11/09/2004 3:20:23 PM PST by Ahriman
It is very rare that one gets to read a truly vile piece of political writing; one in which the veils of fanciful rhetoric and careful implication are pulled back and the bloody intentions of the author come through in clear and undisguised language and in all their horrifying banality. Certainly, Mein Kampf is the quintessential work of this kind, and The Communist Manifesto fairly drips with bloodthirsty rhetoric; but politics is first and foremost an art of obfuscation, and the kind of unabashed intellectual brutality on evidence in those two works is, to say the least, a rare commodity.
It can be said with some confidence, however, that Noam Chomsky's What Uncle Sam Really Wants is just such a document. Like all of Chomsky's books, it is a hasty edited amalgam of interviews, speeches and short articles, and, as such, is not particularly noteworthy. It is noteworthy, however, in two ways: firstly, it is the closest thing we have to a Chomskyite manifesto, for, taken as a whole, it constitutes an attempt to formulate a broad, overarching moral critique of the United States' post-World War II foreign policy; though it fails in a most spectacular fashion, it is far more ambitious in its scope than most of Chomsky's other glorified pamphlets.
Secondly, and far more important, is the directness of its language. Most of Chomsky's other writings are exercises in simultaneously saying and not saying, attempts at what Pierre Vidal-Naquet called Chomsky's "double discourse" in which mammoth amounts of effort and prose are dedicated to being as unclear as possible while simultaneously pandering to the double sentiments of Chomsky's dual audience: the radicals who come to him for his unabashed extremism, and his more moderate, liberal readers who he fears may be repulsed by precisely that.
What Uncle Sam Really Wants, however, is having none of this. It is, in my opinion, the only piece of writing by Chomsky in which it is safe to say that, for the most part, he says what he really means; and what he really means is, without doubt, absolutely horrifying. I do not feel I exaggerate, and I do not use the word lightly, when I say that this is a manifesto of treason; it is the enraged ranting of a man who desires nothing less than the righteous annihilation of his own society; an invocation of the fiery vengeance of a righteous God upon a republic of sin. But it is more than that as well: it is a massive apologia for the most murderous form of tyranny that mankind ever invented; it is an anti-democratic aggrandizement of totalitarianism; it is a childish tantrum replete with rhetorical irresponsibility on a cosmic level and unrelentingly infantile slanders against many good and decent people; it is a whitewashing of class genocide and a denial of mass murder and political oppression; it is an inversion of moralities so total that Orwell himself would be hard pressed to untangle the web of its insidious abuse of ideas and the language in which such ideas are expressed; and last but not least, and with the realization that I dislike armchair psychology, it is the demented cry of someone who is, quite clearly, a moral and intellectual bankrupt, as well as a deeply emotionally disturbed human being.
CHOMSKY - one of hillary's favorite wet-dreams
Next timeclick the "this is an excerpt" button.
Good article. complete article at the link.
I take it he didn't like the book.
Chomsky as sociopath -- an accurate analysis, I believe.
Noam Chomsky is a self-hating, anti-Semitic, terrorist loving, America hater.
chomsky should go back to writing books on linguistics - a field he actually knows something about, and is indeed brilliant in - and stop annoying the rest of us with his mindless politics
I predict a Nobel Prize for the Chompster!
Hey Noam to bad you are so old that you will not get to hear in the years to come, all about the Greatest President we have ever produced. The President that brought peace to the Middle East, George W. Bush! :-)
And Noam Chomsky should take a bath with a toaster.
Isn't this book about ten years old, written in the wake of or in the run-up to Gulf War I?
I think it's been around for a long long time unless this is a revised version. It was more like a pamphlet as I recall seeing it. A short book, like 70-80 pages. Chomsky has a few of those, rarely considered to be his most effective writing for the Left.
As Leonard Piekoff has noted, totalitarians and intellectuals go together like a sword into a scabbord. Heidegger, meet Adolph. Chomsky, meet Osama. I'm sure you'll be very happy together.
Old recycled Chomsky foolishness.
INTREP
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