Posted on 12/01/2001 12:13:58 PM PST by AdrianZ
Time To Bury Chomsky
By Mark Ames (editor@exile.ru)
Wither ould Noam Chomsky, supposedly America’s foaming mouthpiece of the radical left? A recent speech he gave at his patron-institution, MIT, on October 18th (http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm) revealed not a scary left-wing revolutionary ready to rock the corrupt foundations of Empire Amerikkka, but rather, a tweedy old dolt rattling off a tired, harmless list of grievances, a list so stale it would require a plenum of the Central Committee to alter. A pampered lefty who is a hundred times more embalmed than Lenin, Mao and Uncle Ho combined.
It’s the beginning of this speech that shows what a narrow-minded old dolt Chomsky has become. In his introduction, the scary left-wing radical makes a big show about how we should all agree that the attack on September 11th was bad. And anyone who doesn’t agree is no friend of Chomsky’s. What a concession that was! Watch out Vladimir Ilyich!
In fact, it’s a cheap Rhetoric 1A tactic, a lame way of saying, ”Although what I will tell you is preposterous and stale, don’t forget, there are even more preposterous people out there who make me look downright intelligent!”
I’ve seen this kind of rhetorical trick used a zillion times. Usually it begins, ”Slavery/The Holocaust was evil. It was bad and anyone who doesn’t think so is wrong. Buuuuuut...” And from there the imbecile goes on to tell the pick-up truck faithful that everything bad is really the Jews’/Negro’s fault...
I am a fan of some of Chomsky’s work, but have never been comfortable with his bland consistency and reified radicalism, the result of years of musty tenure in the bourgeois institutions that he’d been hired-for-life to ”attack”. You don’t pick up a Chomsky article expecting to discover anything, or expecting to trace his discovery; instead, his explanation for everything evil comes first, the evidence or circumstances come second, like a rigged Easter egg hunt. It gives us all the false impression of diversity of opinion, even if it is state-sponsored.
It’s incredible that after an event that even he admits is one of the most awful, paradigm-shaking events in history, all Chomsky can offer us is yet another account of how Reagan stomped on the Sandanistas. You can almost hear Chris Elliot angrily denouncing our actions in ”Neeekaaarrrrrakuah!” in every line. If there’s one lesson to be learned by all the evil America has committed on its Latin American neighbors, compared to our deferential treatment of Saudi Arabia and its pampered citizenry of spoiled, narrow-minded bigots, it’s that it’s better to slaughter than to pamper. After all, no Guatemalans or Nicaraguans ever flew a plane into an American skyscraper, in spite of the fact that we’ve been genociding them for decades now.
Sometimes Chomsky exposes Western evil that others haven’t—but that doesn’t make him a great thinker, just a good paralegal. In fact, this speech shows that Chomsky is little more than a glorified trained monkey. It’s depressing, really, how successfully the American Left has been coapted by the bourgeois institutions which it was hired to ”subvert”. But that’s not the purpose Chomsky serves any more. His purpose, it seems, is to give a certain market segment in the passive Left the feeling that just by listening to someone and getting momentarily angry or concerned, that they are already better human beings than, for example, the brutes who listen to Rush Limbaugh, who has used this event as an excuse to—get this!—bash the ”liberal media” and the Democrats! I say, feed ‘em all to the alligators. Going to this Chomsky speech would be like flipping on a classic rock radio station and—whoa!—hearing a ”Get the Led out!” hour of Led Zeppelin.
The lack of dynamism or discovery is why, in spite of appearing so ”radical” to more dull-witted crackers, Chomsky comes off as flat, fake, ineffectual, especially now, when something new and interesting is required.
Contrast this with real radicals from the past, people of words and action, who were confident enough in their radicalism to adapt and change when paradigm-shaking events overtook them, rather than merely acting out their narrow role. There’s the example of the Jewish-Italian anarcho-syndicalist Camillo Berneri, who in 1917 eagerly rushed to the front on behalf of a bourgeois regime he was trying to overthrow, writing: ”There are occasions when to get oneself killed is the most logical solution, and to get oneself killed becomes a moral necessity. Cases of conscience are more terrible than Austrian bullets or asphyxiating gases.” Or Paul Nizan, the most bilious of all of France’s France-hating Marxist intellectuals, who volunteered for and died at the front in 1940.
Can you imagine Chomsky risking a stubbed toe or a stained tie on behalf of anything beyond a wine-and-brie gathering in Central Square?
Like George W. Bush, like so many pampered asses in America, Chomsky blew a chance to show something dynamic and interesting and instead he’s hidden in the safest place of all: pre-recorded consistency. Consistency is no argument though. Jerry Falwell is consistent. So are dead people. Chomsky, like the American Left, proves that he’s merely an embalmed radical on display for all the pampered trust fund pastafarians in his audience who have an uncanny ability to politely laugh on-cue, a bourgeois far more concerned about his tenure than about a good and gory fight.
Yo-Ho! Give me more!
Shucks. Before I read the article, I thought had assumed room temperature.
He could've raised the ire of Norman Podhoretz and the rest of the Amen Corner by vehemently criticizing Israel like he's done in the past. The New York Times, which had previously lauded Chomsky, began ignoring him during the 1970s once he started criticizing Israel (and especially after defending Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson).
& Kudos!!!
You can hear Chomskey's hate America diatribes reflected back at us almost word for word in the diatribes of Osama Bin Laden and in Al Zawahari, forming even a base note of attack to be found in Aitollah Kohmeni's festivals of hate for "the great Satan".
The leadership of the Arab Street including the crews of the attack planes of September has been formed within Islamic intellectual institutions and tech schools where Chomsky is eagerly absorbed and taken to heart.
The attack on America was made in America.
I've only heard the Tofu eating liberals bashing Israel lately.
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