[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[risk]

I recognize a good deal of Chomsky in Michael Moore's populist anti-Americanism. I speculate that Moore reads Chomsky and then translates the notions into simple pablum for the average American. It turns out that Moore has a large reading among the rank and file overseas Ameriphiles, as well. Chomsky gets wide reading among foreign elites, as well.

[The Raven]

1) There are zero examples of communism doing any good anywhere

2) Socialism has failed everywhere

3) Most atrocities, mass murders, starvations, and extreme human rights violations have been a direct result of communism and socialism

4) Systems ceding power to a large government with or without checks against power always fail.

[Khurkris]

bump for later reference.

[Tijeras_Slim]

Dissect Chomsky? No thanks, I did worms in 9th grade biology.

[Walkingfeather]

bump for later

[IronJack]

Too much to wade through in one sitting, but I plucked this diamond from the detritus:

For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed.

That is Marxism distilled down to its base essence. "All struggles are class struggles," saith Marx. And Chomsky takes up the beat ...

[Grampa Dave]

http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/001855.html

What many of us find objectionable, however, is Chomsky's fundamental hypocrisy and dishonesty.... Chomsky's writing is meant to mislead and to distort.... He is a practitioner of the Big Lie approach to political debate: if a falsehood is stated baldly and loudly enough, it'll get by.... Here's a gem from the New Mandarins (1967): "Three times in a generation American technology has laid waste a helpless Asian country," that is, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. This is a statement that is so simplistic and dishonest one can only marvel at Chomsky's audacity in saying it. Imperial Japan, helpless? North Korea, rolling its tanks to the Pusan perimeter and coming within a whisker of conquering the peninsula, helpless? But Chomsky is smart enough to know one thing: if he puts it on the printed page, some less perceptive reader will assume it to be true, and the propaganda will have worked its.

Chomsky's big lie is based on his favorite pr role model:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

-- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

[Marylander]

Long but worthwhile. Thanks for posting.

[Chode]

dissection... i'd pay to watch a vivisection done on this POS!!!

[headsonpikes]

Socialism is THE modern religion - never forget that.

Chomsky is an exceptionally minor prophet.

[montag813]

Why dissect Chomsky? Just ignore him.

[montag813]

Every week I go to my local Barnes and Noble and move every single one of Chomsky's books to sections wehere they are likely to sit undetected for a long time. If I can keep even one young mind full of mush from being exposed to this evil piece of excrement it is well worth it.

[Ptarmigan]

Noam Chomsky is a friend of Robert Faurisson, a prominent Holocaust denier. I notice Holocaust deniers are actually hard core leftists and Communists. They are often in academia, like Arthur Butz, Norman Finkelstein, and Roger Gauraudy.

[Donna Lee Nardo]

"His career underscores John Diggins' observation on the academic left: "Having lost the confrontation on the streets in the sixties, they could later, as English professors in the eighties, continue it in the classroom." (The Rise and Fall of the American Left, p. 356.)"

So darn true about chomsky and the entire left.