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Carti ce trebuie citite
- Thread starter Ingula
- Start date
jimosho, eu nu-l am...il citesc la biblioteca nationala..acolo sunt cateva carti..celalalt prin sine insusi...america...si sistemul obiectelor...
in rest...vezi in rusa:
http://www.russianparis.com/litterature/authors/baudrillard.shtml
in gutenberg nu e nimic
in rest...vezi in rusa:
http://www.russianparis.com/litterature/authors/baudrillard.shtml
in gutenberg nu e nimic
Filip_Antonio
New Member
Cine este Noam Chomsky
Deconstructing Chomsky
America’s leading leftist intellectual sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
Mark Bauerlein
The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 260 pages, $17.95
“One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal,” wrote George Orwell in 1945. He meant not the classical liberal who believed in individual freedoms and small government but the leftist liberal who glorified communist experiments and disdained middle-class life. To Orwell, the existence of intellectuals who loved the Soviet Union despite the purges, mocked “bourgeois liberty” despite the pleasing bourgeois circumstances of their own lives, and identified with revolutionary movements that would speedily ship them off to camps—this was a fact in need of explanation.
The same puzzle is presented by today’s leading leftist intellectual, Noam Chomsky. For 40 years, in books, lectures, articles, and TV and radio shows, Chomsky has pioneered the leftist critique of Western imperialism, media conglomerates, and U.S.-style capitalism. The charges he raises are familiar—corporations subjugate the Third World, mass media peddle pro-capitalist propaganda, etc.—but he evidently has the ability to make them seem fresh; millions idolize him as the clear-eyed conscience of the times.
Further to his advantage, while Chomsky’s discourse is extreme and accusatory, his demeanor is equable and deliberate. He is, after all, a distinguished professor at MIT and the most renowned linguist of the 20th century. For many, the combination of virulent radicalism and reasoned temperament is wholly seductive, and attacks upon Chomsky by conservatives and centrists have only granted him a martyr’s aura.
Chomsky’s antipathy toward the U.S. government has never wavered. Even 9/11 was fitted to the theme of U.S. guilt. The killing of 3,000 Americans, accompanied by the “you had it coming” glee of some leftists abroad, put many American progressives on the defensive. But not Chomsky. In the weeks after the attacks, he systematically interpreted them as a logical outcome of U.S. history and policy.
In 9/11, a set of interviews published in late 2001, Chomsky spared the nation no culpability: “The U.S. is a leading terrorist state, as are its clients.” American history was but one bloody aggression after another, each whitewashed by compliant news media and fed to a gullible public. Chomsky was careful to describe the 9/11 attacks as a “horrendous atrocity,” but he also painted violence against the U.S. as an understandable reaction to American foreign policy. In a lecture at MIT, where Chomsky has taught since 1955, he even found a silver lining in a past surprise attack: “The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia—that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.”
Curiously, such rhetoric, which seemed to wear thin in the 1990s, gained a newfound visibility after 9/11. The attacks brought renewed scrutiny to America’s place in the world, and Chomsky offered an extreme moral vision that in its intensity, if not its content, fit the aftermath climate. The press seemed to fumble for unambiguous interpreters of the event, and Chomsky, previously a minor figure at best in the American media, provided a seamless understanding of U.S. guilt. He appeared on CNN to debate William Bennett. He was the subject of a 2003 New Yorker profile. Last year he showed up on Bill Maher’s HBO talk show. His post-9/11 book reportedly sold more than 300,000 copies, and activists besiege him for help and endorsements.
The Anti-Chomsky Reader is a polemical broadside intended to slam Chomsky into oblivion. Reviewing his career and ideas, the discussion reaches back to the 1960s and his anti-war activism, then moves to the Cold War, the media, Israel, the Holocaust, 9/11, and, finally, Chomsky’s linguistics. The editors, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, are active intellectuals in the Republican Party: Collier is the publisher of Encounter Books, a conservative press in San Francisco, and Horowitz, the editor of FrontPageMag.com, is a prolific writer who courts confrontation with the left. Other contributors also are experienced culture warriors. They include Ronald Radosh, a former Communist and SDS member who steered rightward after he researched the Rosenberg case and found evidence of guilt; Eli Lehrer, a former editor at American Enterprise magazine; and Stephen Morris, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute and long-serving anti-communist scholar.
Their aim is to topple Chomsky’s standing—a task easier to conceive than to complete. Chomsky’s unyielding anticapitalism tempts many critics into an equally strident anti-Chomskyism. The temptation is particularly strong for Collier and Horowitz, who have complex personal histories dating back to their days editing Ramparts, a leading leftist magazine in the 1960s and early ’70s. Now staunch conservatives, they have renounced their former comrades, especially icons such as Chomsky.
They and the other contributors do not hesitate to call him a liar and self-promoter, a man of “devious ambiguity” and “fevered imaginings.” The frustration they feel at Chomsky’s fame and influence suffuses the prose and sometimes blunts the argument. The final entry by amateur linguist John Williamson, for instance, documents a 10-month e-mail exchange between the author and Chomsky on matters of linguistics and war in which Chomsky betrayed his hauteur and mendacity as if on cue. (Needless to say, displaying Chomsky’s arrogance in a private communication does little to alter his standing.)
But it would be wrong to judge this volume as merely the opposite of the adulation of Chomsky’s fans. Collier and Horowitz understand well the manufactured reality of political fame, and to dismantle it requires not contrary vitriol or clever rejoinders but direct, fact-based assertions that undermine the authenticity of the image. To that end, the contributors follow a simple procedure: Quote actual statements by Chomsky and test them for evidence and logic. The best contributions to the volume add the effective and timely tactic of citing Chomsky’s progressive virtues and revealing how smoothly he abandons them.
According to his followers, for example, one of Chomsky’s signal talents is his ability to penetrate the veneer of mass politics and uproot hidden facts and motives. In his words, he aims to see through “professed goals” and uncover “background factors” in political events.
Stephen Morris tests that capacity in his discussion of Chomsky’s thoughts on America’s misadventures in Southeast Asia. Thirty-five years ago, Chomsky approached the war as if it were a propaganda endeavor that discerning critics like himself were able to puncture. But what happened to that discernment, Morris wonders, when Chomsky toured North Vietnam in April 1970?
Chomsky’s analysis of U.S. actions plunged deep into dark U.S. machinations, but when traveling among the Communists he rested content with appearances. The countryside outside Hanoi, he reported in The New York Review of Books, displayed “a high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels.” But how could he tell? Chomsky did not speak Vietnamese, and so he depended on government translators, tour guides, and handlers for information. In Vietnamese hands, the clear-eyed skepticism turned into willing credulousness.
Another virtue Chomsky prizes is a solid grasp of historical facts. In his thinking, popular U.S. history is an insidious rationalization of racism and greed. To understand the past rightly, he insists, one must contrast a real truth (the U.S. is a violent empire) with a widespread myth (the U.S. promulgates freedom and prosperity). As the editors of Chomsky’s book What Uncle Sam Really Wants put it, “Chomsky is a scholar; the facts in this book are just that, and every conclusion is backed by massive evidence.”
Thomas Nichols takes on this historiographic talent in his entry on Chomsky’s use of facts and footnotes. Nichols points out that Chomsky’s footnotes are red herrings, his numbers exaggerated, and his facts tendentious. For instance, a footnote in Chomsky’s World Orders Old and New that purports to demonstrate a point in fact leads only to an earlier Chomsky title, and in that text the relevant passage footnotes still an earlier Chomsky title.
But his most damning discovery is broader: that Chomsky lacks a historian’s openness to fresh evidence. All historians know that understanding history is an unfolding enterprise, ever subject to revision. And yet not one revelation of the last 20 years has led to a moment’s reassessment by Chomsky. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of KGB archives, testimony by dissidents and ex-Communists—nothing alters his outlook. When Vaclav Havel addressed Congress in 1990 and praised the U.S. for inspiring those under the totalitarian boot, Chomsky scorned this freedom fighter for uttering an “embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress.” The truth remained: “In comparison to the conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise.”
With its record of crimes and hypocrisies, Chomsky argues, the U.S. could sustain its moral identity only if it had a press primed to play lieutenant to the capitalists and generals. This raises another commended Chomskyan asset: media savvy. In 1988’s Manufacturing Consent (co-authored with Edward Herman), Chomsky launched a widely repeated argument against the consolidation of media and their goal of propagandizing for a power elite. The book (along with a documentary based on it) remains a favorite on college campuses; even among Chomsky’s critics, few are willing to defend centralized media. Indeed, media savvy is a valuable trait, and one would think that an anti-conglomeration media theorist would keep abreast of changes in media structures and deliveries.
And yet Eli Lehrer finds that, in the last 10 years, Chomsky has all but ignored the most striking new medium of our time: the Internet. He says little about the weblogs and other virtual newsroom start-ups that have done the very work he advocates, forcing into the public eye stories that traditional media outlets ignored. When he does heed the Internet, he makes the same charges he leveled against the networks, in the process misrepresenting basic aspects of online communication. The Internet is just the kind of populist medium that Chomsky supposedly reveres, but all he can do is squeeze it into a conspiracy theory.
Other essays in the volume recount similar failings of Chomsky on Chomskyan grounds. He downplays the Holocaust and anti-Israeli terrorism. A philosopher of language, he tosses around the words genocide and terror indiscriminately. (As the U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan, he predicted, “Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide.”) An uncritical defender of the Third World revolutionaries, Chomsky limits the motives of terrorists to reflexive moves against U.S. aggression, a refusal of responsibility that mirrors the paternalism of the colonialist. The only independent thought and action he allows them is the formation of socialist movements.
In turning Chomsky’s virtues against him, The Anti-Chomsky Reader offers a challenge to those who fixate on only the crimes in U.S. history. At its best, the volume transcends the pro-Chomsky/anti-Chomsky debate to focus on larger outcomes in a post-9/11 world. Let us have pointed dissent, it suggests, but without an obsession with U.S. guilt. Keep the virtues—mistrusting government, exploding myths, analyzing media—but apply them impartially. Chomsky is caught in a Vietnam-Watergate time zone, when the Pentagon and White House assumed the most fiendish place in democratic protest. It’s time to recognize that fiends may collect wherever power is concentrated.
Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University.
Ingula said:Mai uitam unde as recomanda o carte si nu am vazut decat topuri si tema mai putin relevante... daca moderatorii gasesc un loc mai bun, please mutati aceasta tema... oricum este o tema despre carti nu doar care ne-au placut, insa pe care trebuie sa le citeasca toti( according to us). Prima mea recomandarea este
Understanding Power, The Indespensable (Noam) Chomsky. Categoria: politics/ Current affairs.
O carte despre current affairs, despre lume si despre ipocrizia unor state. Un sumar al multor altor carti.
Astept recomandari de la altii.. Va rog sa scrieti o propozitie doua( cel putin sa includeti categoria) din care ar face parte
Thanks.
Deconstructing Chomsky
America’s leading leftist intellectual sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
Mark Bauerlein
The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 260 pages, $17.95
“One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal,” wrote George Orwell in 1945. He meant not the classical liberal who believed in individual freedoms and small government but the leftist liberal who glorified communist experiments and disdained middle-class life. To Orwell, the existence of intellectuals who loved the Soviet Union despite the purges, mocked “bourgeois liberty” despite the pleasing bourgeois circumstances of their own lives, and identified with revolutionary movements that would speedily ship them off to camps—this was a fact in need of explanation.
The same puzzle is presented by today’s leading leftist intellectual, Noam Chomsky. For 40 years, in books, lectures, articles, and TV and radio shows, Chomsky has pioneered the leftist critique of Western imperialism, media conglomerates, and U.S.-style capitalism. The charges he raises are familiar—corporations subjugate the Third World, mass media peddle pro-capitalist propaganda, etc.—but he evidently has the ability to make them seem fresh; millions idolize him as the clear-eyed conscience of the times.
Further to his advantage, while Chomsky’s discourse is extreme and accusatory, his demeanor is equable and deliberate. He is, after all, a distinguished professor at MIT and the most renowned linguist of the 20th century. For many, the combination of virulent radicalism and reasoned temperament is wholly seductive, and attacks upon Chomsky by conservatives and centrists have only granted him a martyr’s aura.
Chomsky’s antipathy toward the U.S. government has never wavered. Even 9/11 was fitted to the theme of U.S. guilt. The killing of 3,000 Americans, accompanied by the “you had it coming” glee of some leftists abroad, put many American progressives on the defensive. But not Chomsky. In the weeks after the attacks, he systematically interpreted them as a logical outcome of U.S. history and policy.
In 9/11, a set of interviews published in late 2001, Chomsky spared the nation no culpability: “The U.S. is a leading terrorist state, as are its clients.” American history was but one bloody aggression after another, each whitewashed by compliant news media and fed to a gullible public. Chomsky was careful to describe the 9/11 attacks as a “horrendous atrocity,” but he also painted violence against the U.S. as an understandable reaction to American foreign policy. In a lecture at MIT, where Chomsky has taught since 1955, he even found a silver lining in a past surprise attack: “The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia—that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.”
Curiously, such rhetoric, which seemed to wear thin in the 1990s, gained a newfound visibility after 9/11. The attacks brought renewed scrutiny to America’s place in the world, and Chomsky offered an extreme moral vision that in its intensity, if not its content, fit the aftermath climate. The press seemed to fumble for unambiguous interpreters of the event, and Chomsky, previously a minor figure at best in the American media, provided a seamless understanding of U.S. guilt. He appeared on CNN to debate William Bennett. He was the subject of a 2003 New Yorker profile. Last year he showed up on Bill Maher’s HBO talk show. His post-9/11 book reportedly sold more than 300,000 copies, and activists besiege him for help and endorsements.
The Anti-Chomsky Reader is a polemical broadside intended to slam Chomsky into oblivion. Reviewing his career and ideas, the discussion reaches back to the 1960s and his anti-war activism, then moves to the Cold War, the media, Israel, the Holocaust, 9/11, and, finally, Chomsky’s linguistics. The editors, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, are active intellectuals in the Republican Party: Collier is the publisher of Encounter Books, a conservative press in San Francisco, and Horowitz, the editor of FrontPageMag.com, is a prolific writer who courts confrontation with the left. Other contributors also are experienced culture warriors. They include Ronald Radosh, a former Communist and SDS member who steered rightward after he researched the Rosenberg case and found evidence of guilt; Eli Lehrer, a former editor at American Enterprise magazine; and Stephen Morris, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute and long-serving anti-communist scholar.
Their aim is to topple Chomsky’s standing—a task easier to conceive than to complete. Chomsky’s unyielding anticapitalism tempts many critics into an equally strident anti-Chomskyism. The temptation is particularly strong for Collier and Horowitz, who have complex personal histories dating back to their days editing Ramparts, a leading leftist magazine in the 1960s and early ’70s. Now staunch conservatives, they have renounced their former comrades, especially icons such as Chomsky.
They and the other contributors do not hesitate to call him a liar and self-promoter, a man of “devious ambiguity” and “fevered imaginings.” The frustration they feel at Chomsky’s fame and influence suffuses the prose and sometimes blunts the argument. The final entry by amateur linguist John Williamson, for instance, documents a 10-month e-mail exchange between the author and Chomsky on matters of linguistics and war in which Chomsky betrayed his hauteur and mendacity as if on cue. (Needless to say, displaying Chomsky’s arrogance in a private communication does little to alter his standing.)
But it would be wrong to judge this volume as merely the opposite of the adulation of Chomsky’s fans. Collier and Horowitz understand well the manufactured reality of political fame, and to dismantle it requires not contrary vitriol or clever rejoinders but direct, fact-based assertions that undermine the authenticity of the image. To that end, the contributors follow a simple procedure: Quote actual statements by Chomsky and test them for evidence and logic. The best contributions to the volume add the effective and timely tactic of citing Chomsky’s progressive virtues and revealing how smoothly he abandons them.
According to his followers, for example, one of Chomsky’s signal talents is his ability to penetrate the veneer of mass politics and uproot hidden facts and motives. In his words, he aims to see through “professed goals” and uncover “background factors” in political events.
Stephen Morris tests that capacity in his discussion of Chomsky’s thoughts on America’s misadventures in Southeast Asia. Thirty-five years ago, Chomsky approached the war as if it were a propaganda endeavor that discerning critics like himself were able to puncture. But what happened to that discernment, Morris wonders, when Chomsky toured North Vietnam in April 1970?
Chomsky’s analysis of U.S. actions plunged deep into dark U.S. machinations, but when traveling among the Communists he rested content with appearances. The countryside outside Hanoi, he reported in The New York Review of Books, displayed “a high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels.” But how could he tell? Chomsky did not speak Vietnamese, and so he depended on government translators, tour guides, and handlers for information. In Vietnamese hands, the clear-eyed skepticism turned into willing credulousness.
Another virtue Chomsky prizes is a solid grasp of historical facts. In his thinking, popular U.S. history is an insidious rationalization of racism and greed. To understand the past rightly, he insists, one must contrast a real truth (the U.S. is a violent empire) with a widespread myth (the U.S. promulgates freedom and prosperity). As the editors of Chomsky’s book What Uncle Sam Really Wants put it, “Chomsky is a scholar; the facts in this book are just that, and every conclusion is backed by massive evidence.”
Thomas Nichols takes on this historiographic talent in his entry on Chomsky’s use of facts and footnotes. Nichols points out that Chomsky’s footnotes are red herrings, his numbers exaggerated, and his facts tendentious. For instance, a footnote in Chomsky’s World Orders Old and New that purports to demonstrate a point in fact leads only to an earlier Chomsky title, and in that text the relevant passage footnotes still an earlier Chomsky title.
But his most damning discovery is broader: that Chomsky lacks a historian’s openness to fresh evidence. All historians know that understanding history is an unfolding enterprise, ever subject to revision. And yet not one revelation of the last 20 years has led to a moment’s reassessment by Chomsky. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of KGB archives, testimony by dissidents and ex-Communists—nothing alters his outlook. When Vaclav Havel addressed Congress in 1990 and praised the U.S. for inspiring those under the totalitarian boot, Chomsky scorned this freedom fighter for uttering an “embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress.” The truth remained: “In comparison to the conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise.”
With its record of crimes and hypocrisies, Chomsky argues, the U.S. could sustain its moral identity only if it had a press primed to play lieutenant to the capitalists and generals. This raises another commended Chomskyan asset: media savvy. In 1988’s Manufacturing Consent (co-authored with Edward Herman), Chomsky launched a widely repeated argument against the consolidation of media and their goal of propagandizing for a power elite. The book (along with a documentary based on it) remains a favorite on college campuses; even among Chomsky’s critics, few are willing to defend centralized media. Indeed, media savvy is a valuable trait, and one would think that an anti-conglomeration media theorist would keep abreast of changes in media structures and deliveries.
And yet Eli Lehrer finds that, in the last 10 years, Chomsky has all but ignored the most striking new medium of our time: the Internet. He says little about the weblogs and other virtual newsroom start-ups that have done the very work he advocates, forcing into the public eye stories that traditional media outlets ignored. When he does heed the Internet, he makes the same charges he leveled against the networks, in the process misrepresenting basic aspects of online communication. The Internet is just the kind of populist medium that Chomsky supposedly reveres, but all he can do is squeeze it into a conspiracy theory.
Other essays in the volume recount similar failings of Chomsky on Chomskyan grounds. He downplays the Holocaust and anti-Israeli terrorism. A philosopher of language, he tosses around the words genocide and terror indiscriminately. (As the U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan, he predicted, “Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide.”) An uncritical defender of the Third World revolutionaries, Chomsky limits the motives of terrorists to reflexive moves against U.S. aggression, a refusal of responsibility that mirrors the paternalism of the colonialist. The only independent thought and action he allows them is the formation of socialist movements.
In turning Chomsky’s virtues against him, The Anti-Chomsky Reader offers a challenge to those who fixate on only the crimes in U.S. history. At its best, the volume transcends the pro-Chomsky/anti-Chomsky debate to focus on larger outcomes in a post-9/11 world. Let us have pointed dissent, it suggests, but without an obsession with U.S. guilt. Keep the virtues—mistrusting government, exploding myths, analyzing media—but apply them impartially. Chomsky is caught in a Vietnam-Watergate time zone, when the Pentagon and White House assumed the most fiendish place in democratic protest. It’s time to recognize that fiends may collect wherever power is concentrated.
Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University.
The Anti-Chomsky Reader Continues a Soviet-Style Assault
Michael Leon
CoreWeekly, January 13, 2005
Noam Chomsky is typically described as one of the great minds of our time.
The 76-year-old MIT professor has spent a lifetime championing human rights, and is also renowned for his linguistics work.
But Chomsky is reviled by the right-wing and is received not much better by mainstream liberals.
Chomsky’s mortal sin: Asserting that state policies ought always to support human rights and peace.
“One moral truism that should not provoke controversy is the principle of universality: We should apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others—in fact, more stringent ones,” writes Chomsky (Khaleej Times, August 6, 2004).
Now comes the Anti-Chomsky Reader (Encounter Books, 2004). Editors David Horowitz and Peter Collier have complied an anthology purporting to “offer a response and an antidote to the millions of words Noam Chomsky has emitted. …”
The writers attack him personally and so vehemently that the editors’ ambition of a character assassination project comes through as the perversity of their disdain for the man starts to make you feel sorry not for Chomsky, but for these embittered ideologues.
The Anti-Chomsky Reader is mired in a thick haze of loathing and hard-right ideology, short on verifiable facts and long on ideologically-steeped assertions.
Consider “Whitewashing Dictatorship in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia,” by Stephan J. Morris. Morris writes that Chomsky’s writing is an attempt “… to reconstruct the anti-Western ideology of the New Left; it also is the most extensive rewriting of a period of contemporary history ever produced in a nontotalitarian society.” (pp. 8–9).
A reader ought to do what any rational person advises and read the source material. Read the Political Economy of Human Rights, Volumes I and II and then reread Morris’ chapter, it will make for an amusing day.
As for all the weird personal defamations; they do not merit a response.
Not content to rain ad hominem attacks on Chomsky’s political analyses, the editors take up Chomsky’s linguistics, enlisting opponents who write that his linguistics demonstrate “a deep disregard and contempt for the truth. . . ..” (ix).
Horowitz and Collier are like two old Soviet commissars ordering the banishing of a nonbeliever for counterrevolutionary work and ideological illness.
Chomsky is condemned for “ferocious anti-Americanism.” Horowitz and Collier do not mean that Chomsky opposes the Bill of Rights and classical liberal notions of autonomy. Chomsky’s crime is not toeing the party line and suggesting that citizens comment on perceived defects in state policy.
In fairness, Horowitz and Collier have plenty of company. Consider journalist Andrew Sullivan. After Chomsky’s appearance on HBOs “Real Time with Bill Maher” on November 5, 2004, guest Sullivan let loose, saying that “people who support the Soviet Union, as Chomsky did for so long … do not deserve fundamental respect. ....”
Anyone who reads Chomsky knows his disdain for the Soviet Union. I sent Sullivan two e-mails challenging him on the point, copying in Chomsky.
Reading a Chomsky reply e-mail, I could imagine him laughing as he wrote about denunciations from noted contemporary totalitarians:
“I don’t know if you are aware of how funny the line about my supporting Russia is. Two minutes research would have shown him that I've been strongly anti-Leninist throughout my life, in fact from childhood. He may not know it, but the Kremlin surely did. I was utter anathema there, so much so that my entire professional field [linguistics] was banned. I couldn’t even send technical papers to colleagues and friends in Eastern Europe because it would get them into trouble. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that there were any openings. One of the favorite weeks of my life was in about 1980, when I received two dailies denouncing me furiously for my work on transformational grammar: One was Izvestia, denouncing it as counterrevolutionary, and the other was Argentina’s La Prensa (at the peak of the neo-Nazi military dictatorship), denouncing it as dangerously revolutionary. They’re all basically alike, and Sullivan fits in probably better than he knows.”
Yes, ideologically, Sullivan does fit it with that crowd, as do Horowitz and Collier.
http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/20050113.htm
Filip_Antonio
New Member
The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 26, 2001
WITHOUT QUESTION, the most devious, the most dishonest and -- in this hour of his nation’s grave crisis – the most treacherous intellect in America belongs to MIT professor Noam Chomsky. On the 150 campuses that have mounted "teach-ins" and rallies against America’s right to defend herself; on the streets of Genoa and Seattle where "anti-globalist" anarchists have attacked the symbols of markets and world trade; among the demonstrators at Vieques who wish to deny our military its training grounds; and wherever young people manifest an otherwise incomprehensible rage against their country, the inspirer of their loathing and the instructor of their hate is most likely this man.
There are many who ask how it is possible that our most privileged and educated youth should come to despise their own nation – a free, open, democratic society – and to do so with such ferocious passion. They ask how it is possible for American youth to even consider lending comfort and aid to the Osama bin Ladens and the Saddam Husseins (and the Communists before them). A full answer would involve a search of the deep structures of the human psyche, and its irrepressible longings for a redemptive illusion. But the short answer is to be found in the speeches and writings of an embittered academic and his intellectual supporters.
For forty years, Noam Chomsky has turned out book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet and speech after speech with one message, and one message alone: America is the Great Satan; it is the fount of evil in the world. In Chomsky’s demented universe, America is responsible not only for its own bad deeds, but for the bad deeds of others, including those of the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In this attitude he is the medium for all those who now search the ruins of Manhattan not for the victims and the American dead, but for the "root causes" of the catastrophe that befell them.
One little pamphlet of Chomsky’s – What Uncle Sam Really Wants – has already sold 160,000 copies (1), but this represents only the tip of the Chomsky iceberg. His venomous message is spread on tapes and CDs, and the campus lecture circuit; he is promoted at rock concerts by superstar bands such as Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and U-2 (whose lead singer Bono called Chomsky a "rebel without a pause"). He is the icon of Hollywood stars like Matt Damon whose genius character in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting is made to invoke Chomsky as the go-to authority for political insight.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is "the most often cited living author. Among intellectual luminaries of all eras, Chomsky placed eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud." On the Web, there are more chat room references to Noam Chomsky than to Vice President Dick Cheney and 10 times as many as there are to Democratic congressional leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle. This is because Chomsky is also the political mentor of the academic left, the legions of Sixties radicals who have entrenched themselves in American universities to indoctrinate students in their anti-American creeds. The New York Times calls Chomsky "arguably the most important intellectual alive," and Rolling Stone – which otherwise does not even acknowledge the realm of the mind – "one of the most respected and influential intellectuals in the world."(2)
In fact, Chomsky’s influence is best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader of a secular religious cult – as the ayatollah of anti-American hate. This cultic resonance is recognized by his followers. His most important devotee, David Barsamian, is an obscure public radio producer on KGNU in Boulder Colorado, who has created a library of Chomsky screeds on tape from interviews he conducted with the master, and has converted them into pamphlets and books as well. In the introduction to one such offering, Barsamian describes Chomsky’s power over his disciples: "Although decidedly secular, he is for many of us our rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our pundit, our imam, our sensei."(3)
The theology that Chomsky preaches is Manichean, with America as its evil principle. For Chomsky no evil however great can exceed that of America, and America is also the cause of evil in others. This is the key to the mystery of September 11: The devil made them do it. In every one of the 150 shameful demonstrations that took place on America’s campuses on September 20, these were the twin themes of those who agitated to prevent America from taking up arms in her self-defense: America is responsible for the "root causes" of this criminal attack; America has done worse to others.
In his first statement on the terrorist attack, Chomsky’s response to Osama bin Laden’s calculated strike on a building containing 50,000 innocent human beings was to eclipse it with an even greater atrocity he was confident he could attribute to former president Bill Clinton. Chomsky’s infamous September 12 statement "On the Bombings" began:
The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it).(4)
Observe the syntax. The opening reference to the actual attacks is clipped and bloodless, a kind of rhetorical throat clearing for Chomsky to get out of the way, so that he can announce the real subject of his concern – America’s crimes. The accusation against Clinton is even slipped into the text, weasel fashion, as though it were a modifier, when it is actually the substantive message itself. It is a message that says: Look away, America, from the injury that has been done to you, and contemplate the injuries you have done to them. It is in this sleight of hand that Chomsky reveals his true gift, which is to make the victim, America, appear as an even more heinous perpetrator than the criminal himself. However bad this may seem, you have done worse.
In point of fact – and just for the record – however ill-conceived Bill Clinton’s decision to launch a missile into the Sudan, it was not remotely comparable to the World Trade Center massacre. It was, in its very design, precisely the opposite – a defensive response that attempted to minimize casualties. Clinton’s missile was launched in reaction to the blowing up of two of our African embassies, the murder of hundreds of innocent people and the injury to thousands, mostly African civilians. It was designed with every precaution possible to prevent the loss of innocent life. The missile was fired at night, so that no one would be in the building when it was hit. The target was selected because the best information available indicated it was not a pharmaceutical factory, but a factory producing biological weapons. Chomsky’s use of this incident to diminish the monstrosity of the terrorist attack is a typical Chomsky maneuver, an accurate measure of his instinctive mendacity, and an index of the anti-American dementia, which infuses everything he writes and says.
This same psychotic hatred shapes the "historical" perspective he offered to his disciples in an interview conducted a few days after the World Trade Center bombing. It was intended to present America as the devil incarnate – and therefore a worthy target of attack for the guerilla forces of "social justice" all over the world. This was the first time America itself – or as Chomsky put it the "national territory" – had been attacked since the War of 1812. Pearl Harbor doesn’t count in Chomsky’s calculus because Hawaii was a "colony" at the time. The fact that it was a benignly run colony and that it is now a proud state of the Union counts for nothing, of course, in Chomsky’s eyes.
During these years [i.e., between 1812 and 1941], the US annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change.(5)
Listening to Chomsky, you can almost feel the justice of Osama bin Laden’s strike on the World Trade Center.
If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of young people who had been exposed to his propaganda – and the equally vile teachings of his academic disciples – you too would be able to extend your outrage against America into the present.
According to Chomsky, in the first battle of the postwar struggle with the Soviet Empire, "the United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off."
According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, American operations behind the Iron Curtain included "a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s."
According to Chomsky, in Latin America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments against Communist subversion led to US complicity under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads."
According to Chomsky, there is "a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid."
According to Chomsky, America "invaded" Vietnam to slaughter its people, and even after America left in 1975, under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, "the major policy goal of the US has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing." (6)
According to Chomsky, "the pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust." (7)
In sum, according to Chomsky, "legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."(8)
What decent, caring human being would not want to see America and its war criminals brought to justice?
According to Chomsky, what America really wants is to steal from the poor and give to the rich. America’s crusade against Communism was actually a crusade "to protect our doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor."(9) That is why we busied ourselves in launching a new crusade against terrorism after the end of the Cold War:
Of course, the end of the Cold War brings its problems too. Notably, the technique for controlling the domestic population has had to shift… New enemies have to be invented. It becomes hard to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been ‘the poor who seek to plunder the rich’ – in particular, Third World miscreants who seek to break out of the service role.(10)
According to Chomsky, America is afraid of the success of Third World countries and does not want them to succeed on their own. Those who threaten to succeed like the Marxist governments of North Vietnam, Nicaragua and Grenada America regards as viruses. According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, "except for a few madmen and nitwits, none feared [Communist] conquest – they were afraid of a positive example of successful development. "What do you do when you have a virus? First you destroy it, then you inoculate potential victims, so that the disease does not spread. That’s basically the US strategy in the Third World.".(11)
No wonder they want to bomb us.
Schooled in these big lies, taught to see America as Greed Incarnate and a political twin of the Third Reich, why wouldn’t young people – with no historical memory – come to believe that the danger ahead lies in Washington rather than Baghdad or Kabul?
It would be easy to demonstrate how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced. Every piece of evidence and every analysis is subordinated to the overweening purpose of Chomsky’s lifework, which is to justify an idée fixe – his pathological hatred of his own country.
It would take volumes, however, to do this and there really is no need. Because every Chomsky argument exists to serve this end, a fact transparent in each offensive and preposterous claim he makes. Hence, the invidious comparison of Clinton’s misguided missile and the monstrous World Trade Center attack.
In fact the Trade Center and the Pentagon targets of the terrorists present a real political problem for American leftists, like Chomsky, who know better than to celebrate an event that is the almost predictable realization of their agitations and their dreams. The destroyed buildings are the very symbols of the American empire with which they have been at war for fifty years. In a memoir published on the eve of the attack, the 60s American terrorist Bill Ayers recorded his joy at striking one of these very targets: "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."(12) In the wake of September 11, Ayers – a "Distinguished Professor of Education[!] at the University of Illinois – had to feverishly backtrack and explain that these revealing sentiments of an "anti-war" leftist do not mean what they obviously do. Claiming to be "filled with horror and grief," Ayers attempted to reinterpret his terrorist years as an effort to explore his own struggle with "the intricate relationships between social justice, commitment and resistance."(13)
Chomsky is so much Ayers’ superior at the lie direct that he works the same denial into his account of the World Trade Center bombing itself. Consider first the fact that the Trade Center is the very symbol of American capitalism and "globalization" that Chomsky and his radical comrades despise. It is Wall Street, its twin towers filled on that fateful day with bankers, brokers, international traders, and corporate lawyers – the hated men and women of the "ruling class," who – according to Chomsky – run the global order. The twin towers are the palace of the Great Satan himself. They are the belly of the beast, the object of Chomsky’s lifelong righteous wrath. But he is too clever and too cowardly to admit it. He knows that, in the hour of the nation’s grief, the fact itself is a third rail he must avoid. And so he dismisses the very meaning of the terrorists’ target in these words:
The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people.
Chomsky’s deception which attempts to erase the victims who were not merely "janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc.," tells us more than we might care to know about his own standard of human concern.
That concern is exclusively reserved for the revolutionary forces of his Manichean vision, the Third World oppressed by American evil. Chomsky’s message to his disciples in this country, the young on our college campuses, the radicals in our streets, the moles in our government offices, is a message of action and therefore needs to be attended to, even by those who will never read his rancid works. To those who believe his words of hate, Chomsky has this instruction:
The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.(14)
This is the voice of the Fifth Column left. Disruption in this country is what the terrorists want, and what the terrorists need, and what the followers of Noam Chomsky intend to give them.
In his address before Congress on September 19, President Bush reminded us: "We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follw in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies."
President Bush was talking about the terrorists and their sponsors abroad. But he might just as well have been talking about their fifth column allies at home.
It’s time for Americans who love their country to stand up, and defend it.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1020
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as “the first great autobiography of his generation,” and which chronicles his odyssey from radical activism to the current positions he holds. Among his other books are The Politics of Bad Faith and The Art of Political War. The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as “the perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield.” Horowitz’s latest book, Uncivil Wars, was published in January this year, and chronicles his crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism on college campuses last spring.
Everyone has the right to sacrifice himself for a cause he deems deserving. No one has the right to sacrifice others or to incite others to sacrifice themselves for an ideal.Karl Popper
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 26, 2001
WITHOUT QUESTION, the most devious, the most dishonest and -- in this hour of his nation’s grave crisis – the most treacherous intellect in America belongs to MIT professor Noam Chomsky. On the 150 campuses that have mounted "teach-ins" and rallies against America’s right to defend herself; on the streets of Genoa and Seattle where "anti-globalist" anarchists have attacked the symbols of markets and world trade; among the demonstrators at Vieques who wish to deny our military its training grounds; and wherever young people manifest an otherwise incomprehensible rage against their country, the inspirer of their loathing and the instructor of their hate is most likely this man.
There are many who ask how it is possible that our most privileged and educated youth should come to despise their own nation – a free, open, democratic society – and to do so with such ferocious passion. They ask how it is possible for American youth to even consider lending comfort and aid to the Osama bin Ladens and the Saddam Husseins (and the Communists before them). A full answer would involve a search of the deep structures of the human psyche, and its irrepressible longings for a redemptive illusion. But the short answer is to be found in the speeches and writings of an embittered academic and his intellectual supporters.
For forty years, Noam Chomsky has turned out book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet and speech after speech with one message, and one message alone: America is the Great Satan; it is the fount of evil in the world. In Chomsky’s demented universe, America is responsible not only for its own bad deeds, but for the bad deeds of others, including those of the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In this attitude he is the medium for all those who now search the ruins of Manhattan not for the victims and the American dead, but for the "root causes" of the catastrophe that befell them.
One little pamphlet of Chomsky’s – What Uncle Sam Really Wants – has already sold 160,000 copies (1), but this represents only the tip of the Chomsky iceberg. His venomous message is spread on tapes and CDs, and the campus lecture circuit; he is promoted at rock concerts by superstar bands such as Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and U-2 (whose lead singer Bono called Chomsky a "rebel without a pause"). He is the icon of Hollywood stars like Matt Damon whose genius character in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting is made to invoke Chomsky as the go-to authority for political insight.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is "the most often cited living author. Among intellectual luminaries of all eras, Chomsky placed eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud." On the Web, there are more chat room references to Noam Chomsky than to Vice President Dick Cheney and 10 times as many as there are to Democratic congressional leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle. This is because Chomsky is also the political mentor of the academic left, the legions of Sixties radicals who have entrenched themselves in American universities to indoctrinate students in their anti-American creeds. The New York Times calls Chomsky "arguably the most important intellectual alive," and Rolling Stone – which otherwise does not even acknowledge the realm of the mind – "one of the most respected and influential intellectuals in the world."(2)
In fact, Chomsky’s influence is best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader of a secular religious cult – as the ayatollah of anti-American hate. This cultic resonance is recognized by his followers. His most important devotee, David Barsamian, is an obscure public radio producer on KGNU in Boulder Colorado, who has created a library of Chomsky screeds on tape from interviews he conducted with the master, and has converted them into pamphlets and books as well. In the introduction to one such offering, Barsamian describes Chomsky’s power over his disciples: "Although decidedly secular, he is for many of us our rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our pundit, our imam, our sensei."(3)
The theology that Chomsky preaches is Manichean, with America as its evil principle. For Chomsky no evil however great can exceed that of America, and America is also the cause of evil in others. This is the key to the mystery of September 11: The devil made them do it. In every one of the 150 shameful demonstrations that took place on America’s campuses on September 20, these were the twin themes of those who agitated to prevent America from taking up arms in her self-defense: America is responsible for the "root causes" of this criminal attack; America has done worse to others.
In his first statement on the terrorist attack, Chomsky’s response to Osama bin Laden’s calculated strike on a building containing 50,000 innocent human beings was to eclipse it with an even greater atrocity he was confident he could attribute to former president Bill Clinton. Chomsky’s infamous September 12 statement "On the Bombings" began:
The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it).(4)
Observe the syntax. The opening reference to the actual attacks is clipped and bloodless, a kind of rhetorical throat clearing for Chomsky to get out of the way, so that he can announce the real subject of his concern – America’s crimes. The accusation against Clinton is even slipped into the text, weasel fashion, as though it were a modifier, when it is actually the substantive message itself. It is a message that says: Look away, America, from the injury that has been done to you, and contemplate the injuries you have done to them. It is in this sleight of hand that Chomsky reveals his true gift, which is to make the victim, America, appear as an even more heinous perpetrator than the criminal himself. However bad this may seem, you have done worse.
In point of fact – and just for the record – however ill-conceived Bill Clinton’s decision to launch a missile into the Sudan, it was not remotely comparable to the World Trade Center massacre. It was, in its very design, precisely the opposite – a defensive response that attempted to minimize casualties. Clinton’s missile was launched in reaction to the blowing up of two of our African embassies, the murder of hundreds of innocent people and the injury to thousands, mostly African civilians. It was designed with every precaution possible to prevent the loss of innocent life. The missile was fired at night, so that no one would be in the building when it was hit. The target was selected because the best information available indicated it was not a pharmaceutical factory, but a factory producing biological weapons. Chomsky’s use of this incident to diminish the monstrosity of the terrorist attack is a typical Chomsky maneuver, an accurate measure of his instinctive mendacity, and an index of the anti-American dementia, which infuses everything he writes and says.
This same psychotic hatred shapes the "historical" perspective he offered to his disciples in an interview conducted a few days after the World Trade Center bombing. It was intended to present America as the devil incarnate – and therefore a worthy target of attack for the guerilla forces of "social justice" all over the world. This was the first time America itself – or as Chomsky put it the "national territory" – had been attacked since the War of 1812. Pearl Harbor doesn’t count in Chomsky’s calculus because Hawaii was a "colony" at the time. The fact that it was a benignly run colony and that it is now a proud state of the Union counts for nothing, of course, in Chomsky’s eyes.
During these years [i.e., between 1812 and 1941], the US annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change.(5)
Listening to Chomsky, you can almost feel the justice of Osama bin Laden’s strike on the World Trade Center.
If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of young people who had been exposed to his propaganda – and the equally vile teachings of his academic disciples – you too would be able to extend your outrage against America into the present.
According to Chomsky, in the first battle of the postwar struggle with the Soviet Empire, "the United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off."
According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, American operations behind the Iron Curtain included "a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s."
According to Chomsky, in Latin America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments against Communist subversion led to US complicity under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads."
According to Chomsky, there is "a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid."
According to Chomsky, America "invaded" Vietnam to slaughter its people, and even after America left in 1975, under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, "the major policy goal of the US has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing." (6)
According to Chomsky, "the pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust." (7)
In sum, according to Chomsky, "legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."(8)
What decent, caring human being would not want to see America and its war criminals brought to justice?
According to Chomsky, what America really wants is to steal from the poor and give to the rich. America’s crusade against Communism was actually a crusade "to protect our doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor."(9) That is why we busied ourselves in launching a new crusade against terrorism after the end of the Cold War:
Of course, the end of the Cold War brings its problems too. Notably, the technique for controlling the domestic population has had to shift… New enemies have to be invented. It becomes hard to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been ‘the poor who seek to plunder the rich’ – in particular, Third World miscreants who seek to break out of the service role.(10)
According to Chomsky, America is afraid of the success of Third World countries and does not want them to succeed on their own. Those who threaten to succeed like the Marxist governments of North Vietnam, Nicaragua and Grenada America regards as viruses. According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, "except for a few madmen and nitwits, none feared [Communist] conquest – they were afraid of a positive example of successful development. "What do you do when you have a virus? First you destroy it, then you inoculate potential victims, so that the disease does not spread. That’s basically the US strategy in the Third World.".(11)
No wonder they want to bomb us.
Schooled in these big lies, taught to see America as Greed Incarnate and a political twin of the Third Reich, why wouldn’t young people – with no historical memory – come to believe that the danger ahead lies in Washington rather than Baghdad or Kabul?
It would be easy to demonstrate how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced. Every piece of evidence and every analysis is subordinated to the overweening purpose of Chomsky’s lifework, which is to justify an idée fixe – his pathological hatred of his own country.
It would take volumes, however, to do this and there really is no need. Because every Chomsky argument exists to serve this end, a fact transparent in each offensive and preposterous claim he makes. Hence, the invidious comparison of Clinton’s misguided missile and the monstrous World Trade Center attack.
In fact the Trade Center and the Pentagon targets of the terrorists present a real political problem for American leftists, like Chomsky, who know better than to celebrate an event that is the almost predictable realization of their agitations and their dreams. The destroyed buildings are the very symbols of the American empire with which they have been at war for fifty years. In a memoir published on the eve of the attack, the 60s American terrorist Bill Ayers recorded his joy at striking one of these very targets: "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."(12) In the wake of September 11, Ayers – a "Distinguished Professor of Education[!] at the University of Illinois – had to feverishly backtrack and explain that these revealing sentiments of an "anti-war" leftist do not mean what they obviously do. Claiming to be "filled with horror and grief," Ayers attempted to reinterpret his terrorist years as an effort to explore his own struggle with "the intricate relationships between social justice, commitment and resistance."(13)
Chomsky is so much Ayers’ superior at the lie direct that he works the same denial into his account of the World Trade Center bombing itself. Consider first the fact that the Trade Center is the very symbol of American capitalism and "globalization" that Chomsky and his radical comrades despise. It is Wall Street, its twin towers filled on that fateful day with bankers, brokers, international traders, and corporate lawyers – the hated men and women of the "ruling class," who – according to Chomsky – run the global order. The twin towers are the palace of the Great Satan himself. They are the belly of the beast, the object of Chomsky’s lifelong righteous wrath. But he is too clever and too cowardly to admit it. He knows that, in the hour of the nation’s grief, the fact itself is a third rail he must avoid. And so he dismisses the very meaning of the terrorists’ target in these words:
The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people.
Chomsky’s deception which attempts to erase the victims who were not merely "janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc.," tells us more than we might care to know about his own standard of human concern.
That concern is exclusively reserved for the revolutionary forces of his Manichean vision, the Third World oppressed by American evil. Chomsky’s message to his disciples in this country, the young on our college campuses, the radicals in our streets, the moles in our government offices, is a message of action and therefore needs to be attended to, even by those who will never read his rancid works. To those who believe his words of hate, Chomsky has this instruction:
The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.(14)
This is the voice of the Fifth Column left. Disruption in this country is what the terrorists want, and what the terrorists need, and what the followers of Noam Chomsky intend to give them.
In his address before Congress on September 19, President Bush reminded us: "We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follw in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies."
President Bush was talking about the terrorists and their sponsors abroad. But he might just as well have been talking about their fifth column allies at home.
It’s time for Americans who love their country to stand up, and defend it.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1020
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as “the first great autobiography of his generation,” and which chronicles his odyssey from radical activism to the current positions he holds. Among his other books are The Politics of Bad Faith and The Art of Political War. The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as “the perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield.” Horowitz’s latest book, Uncivil Wars, was published in January this year, and chronicles his crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism on college campuses last spring.
Everyone has the right to sacrifice himself for a cause he deems deserving. No one has the right to sacrifice others or to incite others to sacrifice themselves for an ideal.Karl Popper
Filip_Antonio
New Member
Noam Chomsky’s Jihad Against America
By David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 19, 2001
Note: A reader has pointed out an error in our article "Noam Chomsky’s Jihad Against America", which is important enough to warrant a correction. In his MIT speech, Chomsky referred to a September 16 NY Times article about food supplies in Afghanistan. Through a researcher’s error, we cited an article from the October 16 NY Times in our rebuttal. This led us to accuse Chomsky of making up his quote. In fact, Chomsky was quoting the article accurately. We regret the error. The error, on the other hand, has no bearing on the charge Chomsky was making -- which we rebutted -- that the United States was deliberately planning to starve 3-4 million Afghan civilians. As we point out in this corrected version, the October 16 NY Times article we cited, which described the efforts of the American government to provide food supplies to Afghans, was available to Chomsky at the time he maliciously and falsely described U.S. policy as one of promoting a "silent genocide."
--David Horowitz and Ron Radosh
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3
ON OCTOBER 18, eleven days after U.S. military forces began America’s response to the monstrous September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Noam Chomsky explained the unfolding events to an audience of 2,000 people who were gathered for a prestigious MIT lecture series. His speech was called "The New War Against Terror" and has been posted on the Internet, broadcast on C-Span and published as a new Chomsky broadside. Weeks later, as the fighting in Afghanistan reached its highest pitch, Chomsky appeared in Islamabad to share his views with the Muslim population of Pakistan, that nuclear and none-too-stable state.
Coming a month after the original attacks, and a week after the United States had begun its response, the speech provided a clear picture of Chomsky’s analytic process, his use of evidence, and the way in which the war has crystallized the agendas of Chomsky’s lifelong crusade against his country.
Chomsky proposes to deal with five questions in addressing his subject, the first of which, he observes, far outweighs all the others: "One question, and by far the most important one is what is happening right now? Implicit in that is what can we do about it?" The numbered headings of the answers to these questions in the text that follows correspond to the headings in Chomsky’s transcript as it appears on the website at zmag.org.
1. What’s Happening Right Now? Starvation of 3 to 4 million people.
Well, let’s start with right now. I’ll talk about the situation in Afghanistan. I’ll just keep to uncontroversial sources like the New York Times [crowd laughter]. According to the New York Times there are 7-8 million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation. That was true actually before September 11th. They were surviving on international aid. On September 16th, the Times reported, I’m quoting, that the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population. As far as I could determine there was no reaction in the United States or for that matter in Europe.
In short, in Chomsky’s view the United States had already begun – in a calculated way -- to starve millions of defenseless civilians in Afghanistan. Moreover, no one in the West cared. This is what is "happening now." This provides us with the accurate moral equation for these misrepresented events.
In order that nobody should fail to appreciate the gravity of the point, Chomsky spells it out again in the very next paragraph -- which the website underscores with the sub-heading,
Silent Genocide
Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture we are part of. It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don’t know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that’s just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe.
The style is classic Chomsky. Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. The casual tone and the faux professorial caution in formulating the claim are meant to disarm his listeners as they absorb the charge, which is actually quite lurid, and also quite lunatic – at odds with everything we know about the way Americans and Europeans generally behave, and the way they were behaving as of October 18 in response to the unprovoked Al Qaeda attacks: No Muslim round-ups; no firing squads; no missile sprays at civilian populations in South Asia. But the professor knows better: The calculated starving of millions of innocents is actually "just kind of normal" for us folks.
Chomsky’s answer to the question "what is happening now?" provides his audience with a bottom-line view of America and its Western allies: We are moral monsters; we are coolly planning the murder of not merely thousands of innocents like the desperate crew who brought down the World Trade Center – and whom we are about to punish -- but millions. Moreover, even if the starvation doesn’t actually take place, the intention to make it happen is unarguable. The American government has laid plans "on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it ... The country was on a life-line and we just cut the line."
Of course, these were cold and calculated lies. In fact, it is this kind of malicious libel, characteristic of Chomsky’s political writings that has put them on the shelf alongside the Turner Diaries and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the genre of paranoid conspiracy tracts. Readers unused to such blunt mendacity, might still want to give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they think Chomsky could not possibly have meant what he wrote. Surely he does not mean to place American democracy on a par with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other apostles of the mass annihilation of innocent populations. If so, however, they would be wrong, and Chomsky is the first to let them know it. "All right," he continues, "let’s turn to the slightly more abstract question, forgetting for the moment that we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people, not Taliban, of course, their victims."
No wonder they want to bomb us! No wonder Al Qaeda resorts to "terror" – a word, which as Chomsky will explain, is really a cynical verbal construction imposed on our language by the monsters themselves – since, in fact, "terror" is more properly understood as the real victims’ revenge.
Chomsky weaves these fantasies with the skill of Thomas Mann’s Mario the Magician – a famous fascist prototype whose audience, spellbound by his illusions, could no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, evil from good. Chomsky’s own hypnotic power derives from the impression that his bizarre text is based on actual sources like the New York Times, and as though the reality he is inventing were instead visible beneath its surface to eyes ingenious enough to detect it.
Recall how Chomsky sets up the scenario of a Washington plot to deliberately starve 3-4 million innocent Afghan civilians: "On September 16th, the Times reported, I’m quoting, that the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population." That was September 16th. A month later, on October 16th -- two days before Chomsky’s speech another article appeared written by Elisabeth Busmiller and Elizabeth Becker, which began: "President Bush promoted his relief fund for Afghan children at the headquarters of the American Red Cross today…" In other words, the Bush Administration was working to prevent the starvation of Afghan civilians.
"The Pentagon and the British Defense Ministry," the same article reported, "have agreed to coordinate the air strikes so they will not hit relief convoys…" Evidently, the truck convoys continued. To get to Chomsky’s conclusion, therefore, one has to deny first the reality of American governmental relief efforts and then convert every concern expressed by private relief agencies – some of which like Oxfam have a history of hostility to United States foreign policy -- into irrefutable statements of fact. One would also have to ignore the role played by the Taliban itself in the food crisis. As the Times story itself notes (and Chomsky ignores), the Taliban was stealing food from the very convoys Chomsky refers to, in order to supply their own forces:
The Taliban have also begun levying a tax of $8 to $37 a ton on wheat coming into the country. "One convey of 1,000 tons of wheat was held up for five days trying to negotiate the tax," Mark Bartolini of the International Rescue Committee said. Since airstrikes began, several warehouses have been looted and local staff members have been beaten.
Of course the war conditions in Afghanistan that militate against the delivery of food are the result of the terrorist aggression supported by the Taliban regime. No one would think of blaming Churchill and FDR, rather than Hitler, for the harsh conditions in Germany during the war.
On November 16 -- almost a month after Chomsky’s MIT talk -- another article appeared on the front page of the New York Times with the title, "Now, the Battle to Feed the Afghan Nation." Written by Tim Weiner, the article reported that the American military was using its full resources to "deliver relief for millions of hungry, cold, sick, war-weary Afghans." Moreover, "NATO allies" -- acting as a "full partner" to relief agencies – "will ship food, clothing, shelter and medicine to the nations surrounding Afghanistan for United Nations relief organizations, private aid groups and intrepid Afghan truckers to deliver to people in ruined cities and shattered villages."
In other words, the facts tell a story the exact opposite of Chomsky’s malicious claims. US led military action saved Afghan lives, led to the restoration of food relief, and lessened the danger of the mass starvation that might have been in store had Taliban rule continued. Because of the US action, some five million Afghans, who could have starved, now have hope. While the aid effort is international, the US alone is "paying for much of the good that the coalition is moving into Afghanistan." As Mark Bartolini, vice president of the International Rescue Committee told the Times, "had this war not occurred, we wouldn’t have had the access we have now -- the best access in the past decade." At the time, the Bush administration had in fact provided $320 million in food aid, which has "resolved for the moment" the question of actual food supplies getting to the people.
The Times story was reinforced by an article by Laura Rozen in the on-line magazine Salon.com, which appeared the next day: "Aid experts say that the agencies’ repeated alarms about the impact of the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban have ignored the fact that more food has been reaching Afghanistan since the U.S. bombing began than was before—a lot more." Rozen quotes John Fawcett, a humanitarian relief worker, who stated unequivocally, "more aid has gone into Afghanistan in the past month than in the past year. The aid agencies cried wolf. They said the bombing will stop us from delivering humanitarian aid. It will create 1.5 million refugees. Well, in fact, the result of the bombing is there are 150,000 new refugees -- one-tenth of what they expected, and there’s been a tenfold increase of humanitarian aid getting in."
A possible reason for the exaggerated concerns of the aid groups was suggested by Rozen: "It’s hard not to think that some aid groups’ opposition to the bombing stemmed more from a fundamental reluctance among humanitarian groups to endorse a campaign of violence." It is certainly true that the violence of war affected the flow of aid – in the last weeks of November, when the war was at its height there was a temporary falling off in aid shipments (which were still twice the levels pre-September 11th). But given the conditions of war, the Bush regime, as one would expect, was doing what was humanly possible to provide aid to the Afghan people. So much for Chomsky’s "silent genocide."
America’s defeat of the Taliban, in fact, has greatly enhanced the future prospects for the Afghan people. As John Norris, a senior advisor to the International Crisis Group put it to Rozen, "the retreat of the Taliban from key positions could make way to…a significant increase in aid deliveries and distribution" of food and other materials. "The spigots for aid," Norris said, "are going to be open in Afghanistan now like never before…. This military action is humanitarian action. Do you want to deliver food packets to the concentration camp, or do you want to get rid of the concentration camp?"
On November 30th, the New York Times had reported that the absence of a bridge between northern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan cut off "the most promising avenue for shipping in supplies." Once again, however, the US acted to address the situation. A week later, on December 8, Agence France Presse reported that Colin Powell had flown to Uzbekistan "with a diplomatic triumph under his belt after persuading the reluctant authorities to open a key bridge linking the central Asian country to Afghanistan." The bridge, which opened a few days later, was described as "a vital gateway for getting badly-needed humanitarian aid supplies into northern Afghanistan." In other words, U.S. policy had once again resulted in a situation that increased the availability of food supplies. The bridge had been closed "for four years since the Taliban took control of north-east Afghanistan," and the Uzbekistan government feared Taliban fighters coming into its country if it was reopened. America’s military defeat of the Taliban changed the equation. It was estimated that opening the bridge would supply "40 percent of the humanitarian needs of the Afghan people."
Chomsky’s indictment had two counts – the alleged genocide and the silence that supposedly accompanied it: "Plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it." The first count -- as we have easily established -- is obviously false. The second originates in a thesis familiar to readers of Chomsky’s book, Manufacturing Consent, a vulgar Marxist tract arguing that the American media functions as a propaganda agency for the government and its ruling class bosses. In his MIT address, Chomsky asserted, "the Special Rapporteur of the UN in charge of food pleaded with the United States to stop the bombing to try to save millions of victims. As far as I’m aware that was unreported. [Chomsky did not reveal how he knew this if it was "unreported."] That was Monday. Yesterday the major aid agencies OXFAM and Christian Aid and others joined in that plea. You can’t find a report in the New York Times. There was a line in the Boston Globe, hidden in a story about another topic, Kashmir."
In fact, the story in the Boston Globe was headlined "Fighting Terror Tensions in South Asia" – a region that includes Afghanistan – and there were three full paragraphs on the pleadings of the aid groups to stop the bombing. Moreover, as the citations above show, the story received attention in other sources, including the Times story of October 16. It was also reported on the nightly television network newscasts. It is reasonable to presume that the reason the story failed to receive even wider coverage was that it had no basis in fact, but only in the exaggerated fears of the aid groups, which responsible reporters would check. Put another way, the reason the genocide of Afghans was not a big news feature was that it was not news at all; it was just a figment of Noam Chomsky’s malignant imagination. Since there was no such planned genocide there was also no silence concerning one. Chomsky built his case, as his practice, on a tissue of distortions. It is in the cumulative effect of these distortions that his cultic power derives.
2. Why Was It A Historic Event?
The second question Chomsky discusses in connection with the September 11 attack is, "Why Was It A Historic Event?" His answer is that America, which for centuries has been attacking the world – and especially the Third World – is now itself under attack, which is something for progressives to celebrate.
The change was the direction in which the guns were pointed. That’s new. Radically new. So take U.S. history…. During these 200 years, we, the United States expelled or mostly exterminated the indigenous population, that’s many millions of people, conquered half of Mexico, carried out depredations all over the region, the Caribbean and Central America,… But it was always killing someone else, the fighting was somewhere else, it was others who were getting slaughtered. Not here. Not the national territory.
Leaving aside the malicious distortions of the American past, the Chomsky thesis comes to this: The attack on America is long overdue and is historically just.
Chomsky seems to believe that America and Europe are still living in the age of colonial expansion -- a rhetorical assumption that allows him to ignore the fact that America and its allies do not want to acquire Afghanistan or another Third World country, and are even reluctant to be involved to the extent that they should be. (Their benign neglect of Afghanistan after the collapse of the Soviet invasion is often pointed to as a factor in the creation of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network). Chomsky also ignores the mass slaughter and savage tribal wars conducted by indigenous peoples in today’s post-colonial world. In Chomsky’s calculus America and Europe will always come up negative values. Thus, Chomsky even denounced the recent efforts of the NATO allies to rescue impoverished Muslims facing systematic extermination and expulsion by Serbian ethnic cleansers as an example of "NATO imperialism." So much for Chomsky’s concern for the oppressed.
3. What Is Terrorism?
We now come to Chomsky’s Third Question, which is "What is the war against terrorism?" This, as Chomsky tells us, has a side question, viz., "What is terrorism?" Actually it is not a side question but a rhetorical trick. It is Chomsky’s answer to the first question. The war against terrorism, according to Chomsky, is the real terrorism. In Chomsky’s view, America’s war against the Taliban is not only a terrorist war itself, but also the only terrorism one can accurately speak of. America’s war in Afghanistan is "a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by ‘depraved opponents of civilization.’" This is how Chomsky perceives his own country and the democracies of the West.
The definition of terrorism as "a cancer spread by depraved opponents of civilization" originates – we’ll have to take Chomsky’s word for this –with Ronald Reagan. According to Chomsky the phrase comes from a presidential declaration at the beginning of the Reagan Administration to the effect that (in Chomsky’s paraphrase) "the war against international terrorism would be the core of our foreign policy." As Chomsky interprets this policy, "The Reagan administration responded [to the perceived terrorist threat] by creating an extraordinary international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world,…"
These are bizarre claims, but Chomsky is content to rest them on a single substantiating case:
I’ll just mention one case which is totally uncontroversial, so we might as well not argue about it, by no means the most extreme but uncontroversial … at least among people who have some minimal concern for international law, human rights, justice and other things like that.
The case referred to is what Chomsky calls "the Reagan-US war against Nicaragua which left tens of thousands of people dead, the country ruined, perhaps beyond recovery." In Chomsky’s view, the United States launched an unprovoked war of terror against Nicaragua in the 1980s, using a "mercenary army" (viz., the contras). When the Nicaraguan government lodged a complaint with the World Court about its support for the contras, the American government rejected the jurisdiction of the Court and thus – in Chomsky’s telling – the rule of international law itself.
Chomsky provides no sources for these claims because there are none. There is no truly international court, nor is there an international rule of law – there is only the rule of a law that sovereign states consent to when it is convenient to them. Moreover, there was no U.S. war against Nicaragua, let alone a terrorist war. The U.S. provided assistance to a peasant army resisting a Nicaraguan dictatorship that was supported politically, economically and militarily by the Soviet empire. The Sandinista dictators had usurped their power from a democratic coalition, stripped Nicaragua’s citizens of their political rights and – at the time of the conflict – were ruling by force. It was the Sandinistas who destroyed the Nicaraguan economy and provoked the contra peasant revolt by pursuing Soviet-style collectivization -- confiscation of small peasant holdings and their conversion into socialist collective farms. When the pressure of this peasant revolt and U.S. efforts forced the dictatorship to hold a free election on February 25, 1990, the Nicaraguan people voted the Sandinistas out of power by an overwhelming margin. The anti-Sandinista popular vote was 55%-41%.
The democracy that was created – along with free elections – and the rejection of the Sandinista party continue to this day. Meanwhile, the exit of the Sandinista leadership revealed that they were the ones who truly deserved the term "mercenaries," i.e., political thugs whose self-interest came before all others. Before surrendering power, in what their countrymen called the "piñata," the Sandinista ex-rulers fleeced their country of its remaining wealth, transferred government funds to hidden Swiss bank accounts, and appropriated hotels, industries and restaurants – to go along with the mansions they were already living in -- as their personal private properties.
Chomsky knows these facts but ignores them. On the other hand, several former members of the Sandinista dictatorship have themselves conceded the lies they propagated in power, which Chomsky repeats. In 1999, Sergio Ramirez, a Sandinista leader who was Vice President of the Sandinista regime wrote: "Let the record show that many landless peasants joined the contras or -- resolved not to be corralled into [agricultural cooperatives] -- became the contras’ social base of support…the ranks of the contra kept on growing, and by then its field commanders tended to be small farmers, many of them without any ties to Somoczismo, indeed, in many cases they supplanted the former National Guard officers who had been the movement’s original leaders." Ramirez’ belated honesty was endorsed by former Sandinista comandante and Minister of Agriculture, Jaime Wheelock and by Alejandro Bendana, the Sandinista’s top diplomatic spokesman, who wrote his own memoir (A Peasant Tragedy: Testimonies of the Resistance). Bendana admitted that the "contra army grew beyond … expectations not as a result of sophisticated recruitment campaigns in the countryside but mainly because of the impact on the small-holding peasant of the policies, limits and mistakes of the Sandinistas."
This reality is ignored in Chomsky’s misrepresentation of the conflict as between Nicaragua and the United States, in which the United States is the terrorist and the Sandinistas helpless victims. To establish his deception, Chomsky makes a tendentious mountain out of the molehill of Nicaragua’s complaint to the World Court and the Court’s adverse ruling against the United States. "The World Court accepted [Nicaragua’s] case, ruled in their favor, … condemned what they called the ‘unlawful use of force,’ which is another word for international terrorism by the United States." Well, outside the Chomsky cult, of course, unlawful use of force is not another word for terrorism.
In describing the World Court case, Chomsky ignores the Cold War context of the events -- the projection of Soviet power into the Western hemisphere, and into Nicaragua in particular. Long before they seized power, the Sandinista dictators were trained as revolutionaries in Moscow and Havana. The Soviet goal in supporting them, according to political scientist Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Moscow’s Third World Strategy, Princeton Univ. Press, 1988) was to create a Communist nation with the single largest military in the region. The fact that the Sandinistas were supporting and supplying Communist guerrilla wars in El Salvador and Guatemala at the time of these events was a key factor in determining U.S. policies.
Chomsky closes his eyes to the fact that the World Court is a creature of national governments, and consequently lacks any authority unless both parties to a dispute agree to give it authority. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time Nicaragua submitted its case, dismissed the court as a "semi-legal, semi-juridical, semi-political body which nations sometimes accept and sometimes don’t." Even the Court itself recognizes this reality, and its own statutes expressly permit states to withdraw from its jurisdiction. At the time of the Sandinista suit, the Court in particular had no jurisdiction over any of the Soviet bloc police states, although these same regimes – in which the rule of law was entirely absent -- provided judges for the Court itself. Soviet foreign policy was then operating under the Brezhnev doctrine, which asserted a right to use force to keep a nation in the Communist orbit. Yet the Soviet bloc states regularly condemned America’s defensive responses to Soviet expansion as "aggression." If the United States acquiesced in World Court decisions, it would be bound by them and hence incapable of responding to hostile Soviet bloc actions.
In the Nicaragua case, as one of the dissenting judges on the Court (from Japan) remarked, "Nicaragua has not come to court with clean hands. On the contrary, as an aggressor, indirectly responsible – but ultimately responsible – for large numbers of deaths and widespread destruction in El Salvador, apparently much exceeding that which Nicaragua has sustained, Nicaragua’s hands are odiously unclean. Nicaragua has compounded its sins by misrepresenting them in court." The practical issue was whether the United States would surrender its own national interest to a Court composed of members who were not only hostile to American interests, but to the rule of law itself (among the latter China, Poland and Nigeria). The United States simply refused to accept the jurisdiction of a court composed of rival national interests. By ignoring these details, Chomsky is able to present the decision of a politicized and largely irrelevant institution as representing "the judgments of the highest international authorities" – and thus America as an outlaw state (therefore, in Chomsky’s loopy intellectual framework, a "terrorist" one as well).
Thus, the American-supported contra rebellion, which actually restored democracy to Nicaragua becomes, in Chomsky’s analysis, the "first terrorist war." On the other hand, actual terrorists like the Al Qaeda network are really freedom fighters, resisting a Nazi-like oppression.
Terror is misunderstood, Chomsky informs, us as a "weapon of the weak;" in fact, those who are called "terrorists" are really freedom fighters resisting the aggressions of the strong. As the case of Nicaragua shows, "terror is a weapon of the strong" and, in particular, the weapon imperialists use to suppress people who resist them. To expand upon this "analysis," Chomsky invokes his favorite image when discussing American evil. In customary fashion, Chomsky also attempts to disguise the central role this image plays in his world view, making it seem like a casual afterthought rather than what it is, an expression of his central belief:
It is [regarded] as a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror. Now, that’s close to universal. I can’t think of a historical exception. Even the worst mass murderers view the world that way. So pick the Nazis. They weren’t carrying out terror in occupied Europe. They were protecting the local populations from the terrorism of the partisans. And like other resistance movements, there was terrorism. The Nazis were carrying out counter-terror. Furthermore, the United States essentially agreed with that.
So pick the Nazis. As if Noam Chomsky would pick anyone else:
After the war, the U.S. army did extensive studies of Nazi counter-terror operations in Europe. First I should say the U.S. picked them up and began carrying them out itself, often against the same targets, the former resistance. But the military also studied the Nazi methods, published interesting studies… Those methods, with the advice of Wehrmacht officers who were brought over here became the manuals of counter-insurgency, of counter-terror, of low intensity conflict … and are the procedures that are being used. So it’s not just that the Nazis did it. It’s that it was regarded as the right thing to do by the leaders of Western civilization, that is us, who then proceeded to do it themselves.
In other words, in America’s war against Nicaragua – but more importantly against the Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan who have attacked us, according to Chomsky we are really Nazis: we employ Nazi methods and refer to Nazi manuals. No evidence is adduced to support these claims, but no matter; in the compassion cells of the Chomsky cult, the libel itself will do. The Wehrmaht, whose officers Chomsky refers to, was not a Nazi Party organization -- its officers even tried to overthrow Hitler. But the reference to Nazi methods, manuals and advice effectively conjures images of the master race, the Gestapo, the concentration camps and the Holocaust.
Through slippery allusions, inverted logic, rambling eviscerations of fact from their context and malicious distortions of the historical record, Chomsky pounds his message relentlessly home.
There was a terrorist force in South Africa. It was called the African National Congress. They were a terrorist force officially. South Africa in contrast was an ally and we certainly couldn’t support actions by a terrorist group struggling against a racist regime. That would be impossible.
In fact, the United States opposed racial apartheid, imposed economic sanctions against the South African regime, and helped force its surrender of power to the ANC and a peaceful and democratic transition of South Africa into a multi-racial, democratic state. Every Chomsky example, in fact, falls into the category of gross distortion of the historical facts.
Not content with distortion of events, Chomsky also offers distortions of abstractions from events as in his attempt to formulate a Chomsky law of historical development:
Nicaragua has now become the 2nd poorest country in the hemisphere. What’s the poorest country? Well that’s of course Haiti, which also happens to be the victim of most U.S. intervention in the 20th Century by a long shot…. Nicaragua is second ranked in degree of U.S. intervention in the 20th century. It is the 2nd poorest. Actually, it is vying with Guatemala. They interchange every year or two as to who’s the second poorest. And they also vie as to who is the leading target of U.S. military intervention. We’re supposed to think that all of this is some sort of accident. That it has nothing to do with anything that happened in history. Maybe.
Chomsky’s anti-American fever is so high that he sometimes doesn’t even bother to make sense. In this passage, he describes Haiti as the country subject to the most U.S. interventions and (therefore) also the poorest. Then he describes Nicaragua and Guatemala as vying with each other as to who is the poorest and therefore "who is the leading target of U.S. military intervention." But he has already said that this distinction belongs to Haiti "by a long shot." Obviously it cannot be both. Who knows what Chomsky himself thinks. Or if he thinks.
In fact, the last U.S. intervention in Haiti, during the Clinton Administration, was at the request of the Haitians to help them restore their infant democracy, instituted after the long reign of actual terror under the regime of the dictator known as "Papa Doc." In September 1994, Clinton sent former President Jimmy Carter, along with General Colin Powell and Senator Sam Nunn to Haiti to talk with Haiti’s military leadership, which had overthrown the elected Aristide government years earlier. Facing the threat of a US invasion, the regime agreed to turn over power to the former President, Aristide -- a Marxist priest. (Here’s an interesting question for Chomskyites: Why would the imperialists want to replace military rule in their colony with a government headed by a Marxist?) A force of 20,000 US troops were sent in mid-September 1994 to oversee the transition from military rule to democracy. Aristide returned to Haiti from exile in mid-October. Today, Haiti continues to vote, but without much democracy. The facts show that both the poverty and the lack of democracy in Haiti are indigenous products; the U.S. can be held guilty only of good intentions.
One extremely poor country Chomsky inevitably omits from his list is Cuba, where a U.S. intervention in 1961 failed to overthrow the socialist dictatorship that Fidel Castro had installed. This turned out to be bad for the Cuban people. At the time of the Cuban Revolution, Cuba ranked fifth in per capita income in Latin America -- ahead of Mexico – and fourth in literacy. Forty years later, thanks to Castro’s rule, Cuba is one of the four poorest countries in the hemisphere. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Cuba actually ranks last -- along with Haiti -- in per capita daily caloric consumption. The average annual consumption of rice -- a staple of the Cuban diet, especially for poor Cubans -- was 53.5 kilograms per capita in 1956 but dropped to only 36.8 kilograms in 1997. In other words, as a result of Castro’s socialist economic policies enforced by a ruthless police state, Cuba is an island prison and worse off economically than it was under the previous Batista regime.
By way of contrast, thirty years ago the United States helped to overthrow a pro-Castro Marxist government, headed by Salvador Allende, in Chile. Allende wanted to install a regime modeled on Castro’s Communist gulag. Fortunately the United States supported his opponents. After a successful coup, the new dictator, Augustin Pinochet, introduced free market policies and eventually (if reluctantly) transformed Chile into a multi-party democracy. Since 1975, Chile has shown the most sustained and highest rate of economic growth of any Latin American country and is a free country run by "democratic socialists." The Chomsky law of U.S. intervention evidently cuts both ways.
4. "What Are The Origins of the September 11 Crime?"
In formulating his fourth question, Chomsky rejects the description of Al Qaeda terrorism -- the blowing up of two embassies, the attack on the war ship Cole, the bombing of two 100-story office buildings and the attack on headquarters of the U.S. military in Washington -- as acts of war. In Chomsky’s view they are merely the crimes of individual protesters at the end of their tethers. This allows him to treat the acts themselves as aberrations and, of course, as expressions of the cry for social justice -- desperate resistances to American oppression.
He accomplishes this illusion with typical casuistry: "We have to make a distinction between two categories which shouldn’t be run together. One is the actual agents of the crime; the other is a reservoir of at least sympathy, sometimes support that they appeal to even among people who very much oppose the criminals and the actions. And those are two different things." Are they? This distinction represents a kind of refurbished Trotskyism: Stalin was a criminal but Communism was just fine. So-called terrorists – the Palestinians for example -- commit horrible crimes against women and children but since they are struggling "against a military occupation" they are to be excused. They are "resistance" fighters a term Chomsky casually applies to Hezbollah, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups in the Middle East. In fact the so-called "occupation" is a result of Arab aggression against Israel and the refusal of Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence (and thus any feasible conditions for peace).
Chomsky even makes a tortuous effort to get Osama Bin Laden off the hook. Ignoring the mountain of facts linking Bin Laden to the attacks, Chomsky asserts that there is "no evidence" for his role or that of his Al Qaeda network. Of course in Chomskyland, even if the terrorists are guilty, the true terrorist entity – the United States – is ultimately to blame. According to Chomsky, America is responsible for the attack itself because its government supported the Afghan resistance to the 1979 Soviet invasion, and it was from these circumstances – with assistance from the CIA – that Al Qaeda grew.
It is true that the United States opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thus supported many mujaheddin groups, among them individuals who later joined Al Qaeda. But the United States merely armed them for one battle; it did not shape their intentions for others. American assistance made possible the defeat of a brutal invader who had killed a million Afghan civilians by deliberately bombing their cities. Support for the mujaheddin was a "price worth paying,…" in the words of foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, "because it led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Eastern Europe. To say that supporting the Afghans against the Soviets was not worth it is like saying fighting World War II was not worth it because it led to a forty-four year Cold War."
To pre-empt even this objection, Chomsky insinuates that America is to blame not only for providing weapons to the mujaheddin resistance, but for the Soviet invasion itself. He does this by alluding, without actually citing a specific text, to a comment he attributes to Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. According to Chomsky, Brzezinski once remarked that the United States armed the Afghan resistance in order to draw the Soviets into a trap. In other words, there is no evil connected with September 11 for which the United States is not responsible.
Chomsky then asks a question that is for him and his acolytes actually superfluous: "Why did [the terrorists] turn against the United States?" Observe the answer: "Well that had to do with what they call the U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia. In 1990, the U.S. established permanent military bases in Saudia Arabia, which from their point of view is comparable to a Russian invasion of Afghanistan, except that Saudi Arabia is way more important. That’s the home of the holiest sites of Islam." Does Chomsky himself endorse this nonsense? He purposely does not provide a clue. In reality there is no comparison between the "U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia" and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, because there was no U.S. invasion of Saudia Arabia. The Saudis themselves invited the United States onto their territory to protect them from Iraqi armies that had just swallowed the defenseless state of Kuwait. The U.S. bases there are only as permanent as the anti-Saudi threat.
But not a word in Chomsky’s text indicates any acknowledgment of the absurdity of terrorists’ distortion of the facts. In short, while Chomsky doesn’t in so many words endorse Bin the terrorists’ libels against the United States, he doesn’t disavow them either, but leaves the ignorant and the innocent in his audiences to draw their own conclusions. Quite a display of intellectual responsibility.
What about category two – the "reservoir of support" for Al Qaeda and its terrorist attacks on the United States? The answer: "They are very angry at the United States because of its support of authoritarian and brutal regimes; its intervention to block any move towards democracy; its intervention to stop economic development; its policies of devastating the civilian societies of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein." In addition to the brazen libels in this catalogue (which are Chomsky’s own inventions) – that the United States intervenes in Arab countries to stop economic development and to block any move towards democracy (instances? dates?), and that its war against Saddam Hussein is actually designed to strengthen his rule -- the main point is incomprehensible. If the anti-American anger of Islamic radicals is inspired by the authoritarian and brutal regimes of the Muslim world, why is the terror not directed against them? Why are they supporters of the Taliban -- the most brutal, authoritarian and economically backward regime of all?
5. "What are the Policy Options?"
We now come to Chomsky’s final question – what is to be done? His answer: Since we are the terrorists, the obvious solution is for us to stop being terrorists. Then we will not be bombed. "We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not escalate it. There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed. Namely to stop participating in it."
Noam Chomsky, of course, realizes that America will not cease being America in the foreseeable future. So, shortly after delivering his MIT remarks, and as the war in Afghanistan approached its climactic battles, Noam Chomsky went off on a two-week tour of the Indian subcontinent, adjacent to the war zone, and in particular to Islamabad – the capital city of Pakistan, a nuclear power which is also the most dangerously volatile state in America’s coalition to defeat the Taliban, and one that could tip the other way. The purpose of Chomsky’s tour was to pursue what he thinks is the real solution: giving aid and comfort to America’s terrorist enemies in the hope that they will win the war against us.
On his tour, Chomsky repeated his lies about America’s intentions to starve Afghan civilians and perpetrate a "silent genocide." (This was reported in the Indian press and also to Iranian Muslims in the Teheran Times of November 6.) To tens of thousands and perhaps eventually millions of Muslims and Hindus, Chomsky denounced America as the "world’s biggest terrorist state" and the war in Afghanistan as a "worse kind of terrorism" than that perpetrated recently against the United States. This was obviously intended as an incitement to Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians and whoever else was listening to hate America even more. To turn the guns around. Which is clearly the solution about which Noam Chomsky dreams.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=4146
By David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 19, 2001
Note: A reader has pointed out an error in our article "Noam Chomsky’s Jihad Against America", which is important enough to warrant a correction. In his MIT speech, Chomsky referred to a September 16 NY Times article about food supplies in Afghanistan. Through a researcher’s error, we cited an article from the October 16 NY Times in our rebuttal. This led us to accuse Chomsky of making up his quote. In fact, Chomsky was quoting the article accurately. We regret the error. The error, on the other hand, has no bearing on the charge Chomsky was making -- which we rebutted -- that the United States was deliberately planning to starve 3-4 million Afghan civilians. As we point out in this corrected version, the October 16 NY Times article we cited, which described the efforts of the American government to provide food supplies to Afghans, was available to Chomsky at the time he maliciously and falsely described U.S. policy as one of promoting a "silent genocide."
--David Horowitz and Ron Radosh
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3
ON OCTOBER 18, eleven days after U.S. military forces began America’s response to the monstrous September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Noam Chomsky explained the unfolding events to an audience of 2,000 people who were gathered for a prestigious MIT lecture series. His speech was called "The New War Against Terror" and has been posted on the Internet, broadcast on C-Span and published as a new Chomsky broadside. Weeks later, as the fighting in Afghanistan reached its highest pitch, Chomsky appeared in Islamabad to share his views with the Muslim population of Pakistan, that nuclear and none-too-stable state.
Coming a month after the original attacks, and a week after the United States had begun its response, the speech provided a clear picture of Chomsky’s analytic process, his use of evidence, and the way in which the war has crystallized the agendas of Chomsky’s lifelong crusade against his country.
Chomsky proposes to deal with five questions in addressing his subject, the first of which, he observes, far outweighs all the others: "One question, and by far the most important one is what is happening right now? Implicit in that is what can we do about it?" The numbered headings of the answers to these questions in the text that follows correspond to the headings in Chomsky’s transcript as it appears on the website at zmag.org.
1. What’s Happening Right Now? Starvation of 3 to 4 million people.
Well, let’s start with right now. I’ll talk about the situation in Afghanistan. I’ll just keep to uncontroversial sources like the New York Times [crowd laughter]. According to the New York Times there are 7-8 million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation. That was true actually before September 11th. They were surviving on international aid. On September 16th, the Times reported, I’m quoting, that the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population. As far as I could determine there was no reaction in the United States or for that matter in Europe.
In short, in Chomsky’s view the United States had already begun – in a calculated way -- to starve millions of defenseless civilians in Afghanistan. Moreover, no one in the West cared. This is what is "happening now." This provides us with the accurate moral equation for these misrepresented events.
In order that nobody should fail to appreciate the gravity of the point, Chomsky spells it out again in the very next paragraph -- which the website underscores with the sub-heading,
Silent Genocide
Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture we are part of. It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don’t know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that’s just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe.
The style is classic Chomsky. Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. The casual tone and the faux professorial caution in formulating the claim are meant to disarm his listeners as they absorb the charge, which is actually quite lurid, and also quite lunatic – at odds with everything we know about the way Americans and Europeans generally behave, and the way they were behaving as of October 18 in response to the unprovoked Al Qaeda attacks: No Muslim round-ups; no firing squads; no missile sprays at civilian populations in South Asia. But the professor knows better: The calculated starving of millions of innocents is actually "just kind of normal" for us folks.
Chomsky’s answer to the question "what is happening now?" provides his audience with a bottom-line view of America and its Western allies: We are moral monsters; we are coolly planning the murder of not merely thousands of innocents like the desperate crew who brought down the World Trade Center – and whom we are about to punish -- but millions. Moreover, even if the starvation doesn’t actually take place, the intention to make it happen is unarguable. The American government has laid plans "on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it ... The country was on a life-line and we just cut the line."
Of course, these were cold and calculated lies. In fact, it is this kind of malicious libel, characteristic of Chomsky’s political writings that has put them on the shelf alongside the Turner Diaries and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the genre of paranoid conspiracy tracts. Readers unused to such blunt mendacity, might still want to give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they think Chomsky could not possibly have meant what he wrote. Surely he does not mean to place American democracy on a par with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other apostles of the mass annihilation of innocent populations. If so, however, they would be wrong, and Chomsky is the first to let them know it. "All right," he continues, "let’s turn to the slightly more abstract question, forgetting for the moment that we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people, not Taliban, of course, their victims."
No wonder they want to bomb us! No wonder Al Qaeda resorts to "terror" – a word, which as Chomsky will explain, is really a cynical verbal construction imposed on our language by the monsters themselves – since, in fact, "terror" is more properly understood as the real victims’ revenge.
Chomsky weaves these fantasies with the skill of Thomas Mann’s Mario the Magician – a famous fascist prototype whose audience, spellbound by his illusions, could no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, evil from good. Chomsky’s own hypnotic power derives from the impression that his bizarre text is based on actual sources like the New York Times, and as though the reality he is inventing were instead visible beneath its surface to eyes ingenious enough to detect it.
Recall how Chomsky sets up the scenario of a Washington plot to deliberately starve 3-4 million innocent Afghan civilians: "On September 16th, the Times reported, I’m quoting, that the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population." That was September 16th. A month later, on October 16th -- two days before Chomsky’s speech another article appeared written by Elisabeth Busmiller and Elizabeth Becker, which began: "President Bush promoted his relief fund for Afghan children at the headquarters of the American Red Cross today…" In other words, the Bush Administration was working to prevent the starvation of Afghan civilians.
"The Pentagon and the British Defense Ministry," the same article reported, "have agreed to coordinate the air strikes so they will not hit relief convoys…" Evidently, the truck convoys continued. To get to Chomsky’s conclusion, therefore, one has to deny first the reality of American governmental relief efforts and then convert every concern expressed by private relief agencies – some of which like Oxfam have a history of hostility to United States foreign policy -- into irrefutable statements of fact. One would also have to ignore the role played by the Taliban itself in the food crisis. As the Times story itself notes (and Chomsky ignores), the Taliban was stealing food from the very convoys Chomsky refers to, in order to supply their own forces:
The Taliban have also begun levying a tax of $8 to $37 a ton on wheat coming into the country. "One convey of 1,000 tons of wheat was held up for five days trying to negotiate the tax," Mark Bartolini of the International Rescue Committee said. Since airstrikes began, several warehouses have been looted and local staff members have been beaten.
Of course the war conditions in Afghanistan that militate against the delivery of food are the result of the terrorist aggression supported by the Taliban regime. No one would think of blaming Churchill and FDR, rather than Hitler, for the harsh conditions in Germany during the war.
On November 16 -- almost a month after Chomsky’s MIT talk -- another article appeared on the front page of the New York Times with the title, "Now, the Battle to Feed the Afghan Nation." Written by Tim Weiner, the article reported that the American military was using its full resources to "deliver relief for millions of hungry, cold, sick, war-weary Afghans." Moreover, "NATO allies" -- acting as a "full partner" to relief agencies – "will ship food, clothing, shelter and medicine to the nations surrounding Afghanistan for United Nations relief organizations, private aid groups and intrepid Afghan truckers to deliver to people in ruined cities and shattered villages."
In other words, the facts tell a story the exact opposite of Chomsky’s malicious claims. US led military action saved Afghan lives, led to the restoration of food relief, and lessened the danger of the mass starvation that might have been in store had Taliban rule continued. Because of the US action, some five million Afghans, who could have starved, now have hope. While the aid effort is international, the US alone is "paying for much of the good that the coalition is moving into Afghanistan." As Mark Bartolini, vice president of the International Rescue Committee told the Times, "had this war not occurred, we wouldn’t have had the access we have now -- the best access in the past decade." At the time, the Bush administration had in fact provided $320 million in food aid, which has "resolved for the moment" the question of actual food supplies getting to the people.
The Times story was reinforced by an article by Laura Rozen in the on-line magazine Salon.com, which appeared the next day: "Aid experts say that the agencies’ repeated alarms about the impact of the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban have ignored the fact that more food has been reaching Afghanistan since the U.S. bombing began than was before—a lot more." Rozen quotes John Fawcett, a humanitarian relief worker, who stated unequivocally, "more aid has gone into Afghanistan in the past month than in the past year. The aid agencies cried wolf. They said the bombing will stop us from delivering humanitarian aid. It will create 1.5 million refugees. Well, in fact, the result of the bombing is there are 150,000 new refugees -- one-tenth of what they expected, and there’s been a tenfold increase of humanitarian aid getting in."
A possible reason for the exaggerated concerns of the aid groups was suggested by Rozen: "It’s hard not to think that some aid groups’ opposition to the bombing stemmed more from a fundamental reluctance among humanitarian groups to endorse a campaign of violence." It is certainly true that the violence of war affected the flow of aid – in the last weeks of November, when the war was at its height there was a temporary falling off in aid shipments (which were still twice the levels pre-September 11th). But given the conditions of war, the Bush regime, as one would expect, was doing what was humanly possible to provide aid to the Afghan people. So much for Chomsky’s "silent genocide."
America’s defeat of the Taliban, in fact, has greatly enhanced the future prospects for the Afghan people. As John Norris, a senior advisor to the International Crisis Group put it to Rozen, "the retreat of the Taliban from key positions could make way to…a significant increase in aid deliveries and distribution" of food and other materials. "The spigots for aid," Norris said, "are going to be open in Afghanistan now like never before…. This military action is humanitarian action. Do you want to deliver food packets to the concentration camp, or do you want to get rid of the concentration camp?"
On November 30th, the New York Times had reported that the absence of a bridge between northern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan cut off "the most promising avenue for shipping in supplies." Once again, however, the US acted to address the situation. A week later, on December 8, Agence France Presse reported that Colin Powell had flown to Uzbekistan "with a diplomatic triumph under his belt after persuading the reluctant authorities to open a key bridge linking the central Asian country to Afghanistan." The bridge, which opened a few days later, was described as "a vital gateway for getting badly-needed humanitarian aid supplies into northern Afghanistan." In other words, U.S. policy had once again resulted in a situation that increased the availability of food supplies. The bridge had been closed "for four years since the Taliban took control of north-east Afghanistan," and the Uzbekistan government feared Taliban fighters coming into its country if it was reopened. America’s military defeat of the Taliban changed the equation. It was estimated that opening the bridge would supply "40 percent of the humanitarian needs of the Afghan people."
Chomsky’s indictment had two counts – the alleged genocide and the silence that supposedly accompanied it: "Plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it." The first count -- as we have easily established -- is obviously false. The second originates in a thesis familiar to readers of Chomsky’s book, Manufacturing Consent, a vulgar Marxist tract arguing that the American media functions as a propaganda agency for the government and its ruling class bosses. In his MIT address, Chomsky asserted, "the Special Rapporteur of the UN in charge of food pleaded with the United States to stop the bombing to try to save millions of victims. As far as I’m aware that was unreported. [Chomsky did not reveal how he knew this if it was "unreported."] That was Monday. Yesterday the major aid agencies OXFAM and Christian Aid and others joined in that plea. You can’t find a report in the New York Times. There was a line in the Boston Globe, hidden in a story about another topic, Kashmir."
In fact, the story in the Boston Globe was headlined "Fighting Terror Tensions in South Asia" – a region that includes Afghanistan – and there were three full paragraphs on the pleadings of the aid groups to stop the bombing. Moreover, as the citations above show, the story received attention in other sources, including the Times story of October 16. It was also reported on the nightly television network newscasts. It is reasonable to presume that the reason the story failed to receive even wider coverage was that it had no basis in fact, but only in the exaggerated fears of the aid groups, which responsible reporters would check. Put another way, the reason the genocide of Afghans was not a big news feature was that it was not news at all; it was just a figment of Noam Chomsky’s malignant imagination. Since there was no such planned genocide there was also no silence concerning one. Chomsky built his case, as his practice, on a tissue of distortions. It is in the cumulative effect of these distortions that his cultic power derives.
2. Why Was It A Historic Event?
The second question Chomsky discusses in connection with the September 11 attack is, "Why Was It A Historic Event?" His answer is that America, which for centuries has been attacking the world – and especially the Third World – is now itself under attack, which is something for progressives to celebrate.
The change was the direction in which the guns were pointed. That’s new. Radically new. So take U.S. history…. During these 200 years, we, the United States expelled or mostly exterminated the indigenous population, that’s many millions of people, conquered half of Mexico, carried out depredations all over the region, the Caribbean and Central America,… But it was always killing someone else, the fighting was somewhere else, it was others who were getting slaughtered. Not here. Not the national territory.
Leaving aside the malicious distortions of the American past, the Chomsky thesis comes to this: The attack on America is long overdue and is historically just.
Chomsky seems to believe that America and Europe are still living in the age of colonial expansion -- a rhetorical assumption that allows him to ignore the fact that America and its allies do not want to acquire Afghanistan or another Third World country, and are even reluctant to be involved to the extent that they should be. (Their benign neglect of Afghanistan after the collapse of the Soviet invasion is often pointed to as a factor in the creation of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network). Chomsky also ignores the mass slaughter and savage tribal wars conducted by indigenous peoples in today’s post-colonial world. In Chomsky’s calculus America and Europe will always come up negative values. Thus, Chomsky even denounced the recent efforts of the NATO allies to rescue impoverished Muslims facing systematic extermination and expulsion by Serbian ethnic cleansers as an example of "NATO imperialism." So much for Chomsky’s concern for the oppressed.
3. What Is Terrorism?
We now come to Chomsky’s Third Question, which is "What is the war against terrorism?" This, as Chomsky tells us, has a side question, viz., "What is terrorism?" Actually it is not a side question but a rhetorical trick. It is Chomsky’s answer to the first question. The war against terrorism, according to Chomsky, is the real terrorism. In Chomsky’s view, America’s war against the Taliban is not only a terrorist war itself, but also the only terrorism one can accurately speak of. America’s war in Afghanistan is "a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by ‘depraved opponents of civilization.’" This is how Chomsky perceives his own country and the democracies of the West.
The definition of terrorism as "a cancer spread by depraved opponents of civilization" originates – we’ll have to take Chomsky’s word for this –with Ronald Reagan. According to Chomsky the phrase comes from a presidential declaration at the beginning of the Reagan Administration to the effect that (in Chomsky’s paraphrase) "the war against international terrorism would be the core of our foreign policy." As Chomsky interprets this policy, "The Reagan administration responded [to the perceived terrorist threat] by creating an extraordinary international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world,…"
These are bizarre claims, but Chomsky is content to rest them on a single substantiating case:
I’ll just mention one case which is totally uncontroversial, so we might as well not argue about it, by no means the most extreme but uncontroversial … at least among people who have some minimal concern for international law, human rights, justice and other things like that.
The case referred to is what Chomsky calls "the Reagan-US war against Nicaragua which left tens of thousands of people dead, the country ruined, perhaps beyond recovery." In Chomsky’s view, the United States launched an unprovoked war of terror against Nicaragua in the 1980s, using a "mercenary army" (viz., the contras). When the Nicaraguan government lodged a complaint with the World Court about its support for the contras, the American government rejected the jurisdiction of the Court and thus – in Chomsky’s telling – the rule of international law itself.
Chomsky provides no sources for these claims because there are none. There is no truly international court, nor is there an international rule of law – there is only the rule of a law that sovereign states consent to when it is convenient to them. Moreover, there was no U.S. war against Nicaragua, let alone a terrorist war. The U.S. provided assistance to a peasant army resisting a Nicaraguan dictatorship that was supported politically, economically and militarily by the Soviet empire. The Sandinista dictators had usurped their power from a democratic coalition, stripped Nicaragua’s citizens of their political rights and – at the time of the conflict – were ruling by force. It was the Sandinistas who destroyed the Nicaraguan economy and provoked the contra peasant revolt by pursuing Soviet-style collectivization -- confiscation of small peasant holdings and their conversion into socialist collective farms. When the pressure of this peasant revolt and U.S. efforts forced the dictatorship to hold a free election on February 25, 1990, the Nicaraguan people voted the Sandinistas out of power by an overwhelming margin. The anti-Sandinista popular vote was 55%-41%.
The democracy that was created – along with free elections – and the rejection of the Sandinista party continue to this day. Meanwhile, the exit of the Sandinista leadership revealed that they were the ones who truly deserved the term "mercenaries," i.e., political thugs whose self-interest came before all others. Before surrendering power, in what their countrymen called the "piñata," the Sandinista ex-rulers fleeced their country of its remaining wealth, transferred government funds to hidden Swiss bank accounts, and appropriated hotels, industries and restaurants – to go along with the mansions they were already living in -- as their personal private properties.
Chomsky knows these facts but ignores them. On the other hand, several former members of the Sandinista dictatorship have themselves conceded the lies they propagated in power, which Chomsky repeats. In 1999, Sergio Ramirez, a Sandinista leader who was Vice President of the Sandinista regime wrote: "Let the record show that many landless peasants joined the contras or -- resolved not to be corralled into [agricultural cooperatives] -- became the contras’ social base of support…the ranks of the contra kept on growing, and by then its field commanders tended to be small farmers, many of them without any ties to Somoczismo, indeed, in many cases they supplanted the former National Guard officers who had been the movement’s original leaders." Ramirez’ belated honesty was endorsed by former Sandinista comandante and Minister of Agriculture, Jaime Wheelock and by Alejandro Bendana, the Sandinista’s top diplomatic spokesman, who wrote his own memoir (A Peasant Tragedy: Testimonies of the Resistance). Bendana admitted that the "contra army grew beyond … expectations not as a result of sophisticated recruitment campaigns in the countryside but mainly because of the impact on the small-holding peasant of the policies, limits and mistakes of the Sandinistas."
This reality is ignored in Chomsky’s misrepresentation of the conflict as between Nicaragua and the United States, in which the United States is the terrorist and the Sandinistas helpless victims. To establish his deception, Chomsky makes a tendentious mountain out of the molehill of Nicaragua’s complaint to the World Court and the Court’s adverse ruling against the United States. "The World Court accepted [Nicaragua’s] case, ruled in their favor, … condemned what they called the ‘unlawful use of force,’ which is another word for international terrorism by the United States." Well, outside the Chomsky cult, of course, unlawful use of force is not another word for terrorism.
In describing the World Court case, Chomsky ignores the Cold War context of the events -- the projection of Soviet power into the Western hemisphere, and into Nicaragua in particular. Long before they seized power, the Sandinista dictators were trained as revolutionaries in Moscow and Havana. The Soviet goal in supporting them, according to political scientist Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Moscow’s Third World Strategy, Princeton Univ. Press, 1988) was to create a Communist nation with the single largest military in the region. The fact that the Sandinistas were supporting and supplying Communist guerrilla wars in El Salvador and Guatemala at the time of these events was a key factor in determining U.S. policies.
Chomsky closes his eyes to the fact that the World Court is a creature of national governments, and consequently lacks any authority unless both parties to a dispute agree to give it authority. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time Nicaragua submitted its case, dismissed the court as a "semi-legal, semi-juridical, semi-political body which nations sometimes accept and sometimes don’t." Even the Court itself recognizes this reality, and its own statutes expressly permit states to withdraw from its jurisdiction. At the time of the Sandinista suit, the Court in particular had no jurisdiction over any of the Soviet bloc police states, although these same regimes – in which the rule of law was entirely absent -- provided judges for the Court itself. Soviet foreign policy was then operating under the Brezhnev doctrine, which asserted a right to use force to keep a nation in the Communist orbit. Yet the Soviet bloc states regularly condemned America’s defensive responses to Soviet expansion as "aggression." If the United States acquiesced in World Court decisions, it would be bound by them and hence incapable of responding to hostile Soviet bloc actions.
In the Nicaragua case, as one of the dissenting judges on the Court (from Japan) remarked, "Nicaragua has not come to court with clean hands. On the contrary, as an aggressor, indirectly responsible – but ultimately responsible – for large numbers of deaths and widespread destruction in El Salvador, apparently much exceeding that which Nicaragua has sustained, Nicaragua’s hands are odiously unclean. Nicaragua has compounded its sins by misrepresenting them in court." The practical issue was whether the United States would surrender its own national interest to a Court composed of members who were not only hostile to American interests, but to the rule of law itself (among the latter China, Poland and Nigeria). The United States simply refused to accept the jurisdiction of a court composed of rival national interests. By ignoring these details, Chomsky is able to present the decision of a politicized and largely irrelevant institution as representing "the judgments of the highest international authorities" – and thus America as an outlaw state (therefore, in Chomsky’s loopy intellectual framework, a "terrorist" one as well).
Thus, the American-supported contra rebellion, which actually restored democracy to Nicaragua becomes, in Chomsky’s analysis, the "first terrorist war." On the other hand, actual terrorists like the Al Qaeda network are really freedom fighters, resisting a Nazi-like oppression.
Terror is misunderstood, Chomsky informs, us as a "weapon of the weak;" in fact, those who are called "terrorists" are really freedom fighters resisting the aggressions of the strong. As the case of Nicaragua shows, "terror is a weapon of the strong" and, in particular, the weapon imperialists use to suppress people who resist them. To expand upon this "analysis," Chomsky invokes his favorite image when discussing American evil. In customary fashion, Chomsky also attempts to disguise the central role this image plays in his world view, making it seem like a casual afterthought rather than what it is, an expression of his central belief:
It is [regarded] as a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror. Now, that’s close to universal. I can’t think of a historical exception. Even the worst mass murderers view the world that way. So pick the Nazis. They weren’t carrying out terror in occupied Europe. They were protecting the local populations from the terrorism of the partisans. And like other resistance movements, there was terrorism. The Nazis were carrying out counter-terror. Furthermore, the United States essentially agreed with that.
So pick the Nazis. As if Noam Chomsky would pick anyone else:
After the war, the U.S. army did extensive studies of Nazi counter-terror operations in Europe. First I should say the U.S. picked them up and began carrying them out itself, often against the same targets, the former resistance. But the military also studied the Nazi methods, published interesting studies… Those methods, with the advice of Wehrmacht officers who were brought over here became the manuals of counter-insurgency, of counter-terror, of low intensity conflict … and are the procedures that are being used. So it’s not just that the Nazis did it. It’s that it was regarded as the right thing to do by the leaders of Western civilization, that is us, who then proceeded to do it themselves.
In other words, in America’s war against Nicaragua – but more importantly against the Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan who have attacked us, according to Chomsky we are really Nazis: we employ Nazi methods and refer to Nazi manuals. No evidence is adduced to support these claims, but no matter; in the compassion cells of the Chomsky cult, the libel itself will do. The Wehrmaht, whose officers Chomsky refers to, was not a Nazi Party organization -- its officers even tried to overthrow Hitler. But the reference to Nazi methods, manuals and advice effectively conjures images of the master race, the Gestapo, the concentration camps and the Holocaust.
Through slippery allusions, inverted logic, rambling eviscerations of fact from their context and malicious distortions of the historical record, Chomsky pounds his message relentlessly home.
There was a terrorist force in South Africa. It was called the African National Congress. They were a terrorist force officially. South Africa in contrast was an ally and we certainly couldn’t support actions by a terrorist group struggling against a racist regime. That would be impossible.
In fact, the United States opposed racial apartheid, imposed economic sanctions against the South African regime, and helped force its surrender of power to the ANC and a peaceful and democratic transition of South Africa into a multi-racial, democratic state. Every Chomsky example, in fact, falls into the category of gross distortion of the historical facts.
Not content with distortion of events, Chomsky also offers distortions of abstractions from events as in his attempt to formulate a Chomsky law of historical development:
Nicaragua has now become the 2nd poorest country in the hemisphere. What’s the poorest country? Well that’s of course Haiti, which also happens to be the victim of most U.S. intervention in the 20th Century by a long shot…. Nicaragua is second ranked in degree of U.S. intervention in the 20th century. It is the 2nd poorest. Actually, it is vying with Guatemala. They interchange every year or two as to who’s the second poorest. And they also vie as to who is the leading target of U.S. military intervention. We’re supposed to think that all of this is some sort of accident. That it has nothing to do with anything that happened in history. Maybe.
Chomsky’s anti-American fever is so high that he sometimes doesn’t even bother to make sense. In this passage, he describes Haiti as the country subject to the most U.S. interventions and (therefore) also the poorest. Then he describes Nicaragua and Guatemala as vying with each other as to who is the poorest and therefore "who is the leading target of U.S. military intervention." But he has already said that this distinction belongs to Haiti "by a long shot." Obviously it cannot be both. Who knows what Chomsky himself thinks. Or if he thinks.
In fact, the last U.S. intervention in Haiti, during the Clinton Administration, was at the request of the Haitians to help them restore their infant democracy, instituted after the long reign of actual terror under the regime of the dictator known as "Papa Doc." In September 1994, Clinton sent former President Jimmy Carter, along with General Colin Powell and Senator Sam Nunn to Haiti to talk with Haiti’s military leadership, which had overthrown the elected Aristide government years earlier. Facing the threat of a US invasion, the regime agreed to turn over power to the former President, Aristide -- a Marxist priest. (Here’s an interesting question for Chomskyites: Why would the imperialists want to replace military rule in their colony with a government headed by a Marxist?) A force of 20,000 US troops were sent in mid-September 1994 to oversee the transition from military rule to democracy. Aristide returned to Haiti from exile in mid-October. Today, Haiti continues to vote, but without much democracy. The facts show that both the poverty and the lack of democracy in Haiti are indigenous products; the U.S. can be held guilty only of good intentions.
One extremely poor country Chomsky inevitably omits from his list is Cuba, where a U.S. intervention in 1961 failed to overthrow the socialist dictatorship that Fidel Castro had installed. This turned out to be bad for the Cuban people. At the time of the Cuban Revolution, Cuba ranked fifth in per capita income in Latin America -- ahead of Mexico – and fourth in literacy. Forty years later, thanks to Castro’s rule, Cuba is one of the four poorest countries in the hemisphere. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Cuba actually ranks last -- along with Haiti -- in per capita daily caloric consumption. The average annual consumption of rice -- a staple of the Cuban diet, especially for poor Cubans -- was 53.5 kilograms per capita in 1956 but dropped to only 36.8 kilograms in 1997. In other words, as a result of Castro’s socialist economic policies enforced by a ruthless police state, Cuba is an island prison and worse off economically than it was under the previous Batista regime.
By way of contrast, thirty years ago the United States helped to overthrow a pro-Castro Marxist government, headed by Salvador Allende, in Chile. Allende wanted to install a regime modeled on Castro’s Communist gulag. Fortunately the United States supported his opponents. After a successful coup, the new dictator, Augustin Pinochet, introduced free market policies and eventually (if reluctantly) transformed Chile into a multi-party democracy. Since 1975, Chile has shown the most sustained and highest rate of economic growth of any Latin American country and is a free country run by "democratic socialists." The Chomsky law of U.S. intervention evidently cuts both ways.
4. "What Are The Origins of the September 11 Crime?"
In formulating his fourth question, Chomsky rejects the description of Al Qaeda terrorism -- the blowing up of two embassies, the attack on the war ship Cole, the bombing of two 100-story office buildings and the attack on headquarters of the U.S. military in Washington -- as acts of war. In Chomsky’s view they are merely the crimes of individual protesters at the end of their tethers. This allows him to treat the acts themselves as aberrations and, of course, as expressions of the cry for social justice -- desperate resistances to American oppression.
He accomplishes this illusion with typical casuistry: "We have to make a distinction between two categories which shouldn’t be run together. One is the actual agents of the crime; the other is a reservoir of at least sympathy, sometimes support that they appeal to even among people who very much oppose the criminals and the actions. And those are two different things." Are they? This distinction represents a kind of refurbished Trotskyism: Stalin was a criminal but Communism was just fine. So-called terrorists – the Palestinians for example -- commit horrible crimes against women and children but since they are struggling "against a military occupation" they are to be excused. They are "resistance" fighters a term Chomsky casually applies to Hezbollah, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups in the Middle East. In fact the so-called "occupation" is a result of Arab aggression against Israel and the refusal of Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence (and thus any feasible conditions for peace).
Chomsky even makes a tortuous effort to get Osama Bin Laden off the hook. Ignoring the mountain of facts linking Bin Laden to the attacks, Chomsky asserts that there is "no evidence" for his role or that of his Al Qaeda network. Of course in Chomskyland, even if the terrorists are guilty, the true terrorist entity – the United States – is ultimately to blame. According to Chomsky, America is responsible for the attack itself because its government supported the Afghan resistance to the 1979 Soviet invasion, and it was from these circumstances – with assistance from the CIA – that Al Qaeda grew.
It is true that the United States opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thus supported many mujaheddin groups, among them individuals who later joined Al Qaeda. But the United States merely armed them for one battle; it did not shape their intentions for others. American assistance made possible the defeat of a brutal invader who had killed a million Afghan civilians by deliberately bombing their cities. Support for the mujaheddin was a "price worth paying,…" in the words of foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, "because it led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Eastern Europe. To say that supporting the Afghans against the Soviets was not worth it is like saying fighting World War II was not worth it because it led to a forty-four year Cold War."
To pre-empt even this objection, Chomsky insinuates that America is to blame not only for providing weapons to the mujaheddin resistance, but for the Soviet invasion itself. He does this by alluding, without actually citing a specific text, to a comment he attributes to Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. According to Chomsky, Brzezinski once remarked that the United States armed the Afghan resistance in order to draw the Soviets into a trap. In other words, there is no evil connected with September 11 for which the United States is not responsible.
Chomsky then asks a question that is for him and his acolytes actually superfluous: "Why did [the terrorists] turn against the United States?" Observe the answer: "Well that had to do with what they call the U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia. In 1990, the U.S. established permanent military bases in Saudia Arabia, which from their point of view is comparable to a Russian invasion of Afghanistan, except that Saudi Arabia is way more important. That’s the home of the holiest sites of Islam." Does Chomsky himself endorse this nonsense? He purposely does not provide a clue. In reality there is no comparison between the "U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia" and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, because there was no U.S. invasion of Saudia Arabia. The Saudis themselves invited the United States onto their territory to protect them from Iraqi armies that had just swallowed the defenseless state of Kuwait. The U.S. bases there are only as permanent as the anti-Saudi threat.
But not a word in Chomsky’s text indicates any acknowledgment of the absurdity of terrorists’ distortion of the facts. In short, while Chomsky doesn’t in so many words endorse Bin the terrorists’ libels against the United States, he doesn’t disavow them either, but leaves the ignorant and the innocent in his audiences to draw their own conclusions. Quite a display of intellectual responsibility.
What about category two – the "reservoir of support" for Al Qaeda and its terrorist attacks on the United States? The answer: "They are very angry at the United States because of its support of authoritarian and brutal regimes; its intervention to block any move towards democracy; its intervention to stop economic development; its policies of devastating the civilian societies of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein." In addition to the brazen libels in this catalogue (which are Chomsky’s own inventions) – that the United States intervenes in Arab countries to stop economic development and to block any move towards democracy (instances? dates?), and that its war against Saddam Hussein is actually designed to strengthen his rule -- the main point is incomprehensible. If the anti-American anger of Islamic radicals is inspired by the authoritarian and brutal regimes of the Muslim world, why is the terror not directed against them? Why are they supporters of the Taliban -- the most brutal, authoritarian and economically backward regime of all?
5. "What are the Policy Options?"
We now come to Chomsky’s final question – what is to be done? His answer: Since we are the terrorists, the obvious solution is for us to stop being terrorists. Then we will not be bombed. "We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not escalate it. There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed. Namely to stop participating in it."
Noam Chomsky, of course, realizes that America will not cease being America in the foreseeable future. So, shortly after delivering his MIT remarks, and as the war in Afghanistan approached its climactic battles, Noam Chomsky went off on a two-week tour of the Indian subcontinent, adjacent to the war zone, and in particular to Islamabad – the capital city of Pakistan, a nuclear power which is also the most dangerously volatile state in America’s coalition to defeat the Taliban, and one that could tip the other way. The purpose of Chomsky’s tour was to pursue what he thinks is the real solution: giving aid and comfort to America’s terrorist enemies in the hope that they will win the war against us.
On his tour, Chomsky repeated his lies about America’s intentions to starve Afghan civilians and perpetrate a "silent genocide." (This was reported in the Indian press and also to Iranian Muslims in the Teheran Times of November 6.) To tens of thousands and perhaps eventually millions of Muslims and Hindus, Chomsky denounced America as the "world’s biggest terrorist state" and the war in Afghanistan as a "worse kind of terrorism" than that perpetrated recently against the United States. This was obviously intended as an incitement to Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians and whoever else was listening to hate America even more. To turn the guns around. Which is clearly the solution about which Noam Chomsky dreams.
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The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky: Part II Method and Madness
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 10, 2001
ONE OF THE TYPICAL ILLUSIONS of the Chomsky cult is the belief that its imam and sensei is not the unbalanced dervish of anti-American loathing he appears to everyone else, but an analytic giant whose dicta flow from a painstaking and scientific inquiry into the facts. "The only reason Noam Chomsky is an international political force unto himself," writes a typically fervid acolyte, "is that he actually spends considerable time researching, analyzing, corroborating, deconstructing, and impassionately [sic] explaining world affairs." This conviction is almost as delusional as Chomsky’s view of the world itself. It would be more accurate to say of the Chomsky oeuvre -- lifting a famous line from the late Mary McCarthy -- that everything he has written is a lie, including the "ands" and "the’s."
Chomskyites who read "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky (Part I)" have complained that "there is not one single comment …that contradicts Chomsky’s research." Consequently, my refutation of Chomsky was not achieved "by reasoned argument or detailing the errors of fact or logic in his writings and statements, but by character assassination and the trivializing of Chomsky’s strongly held beliefs through accusations that they were unpatriotic."
I confess to being a little puzzled by this objection. Having described Chomsky’s equation of post-World War II America with Nazi Germany, it did not actually occur to me that additional refutation was required. Not, at any rate, among the sound of mind. It is true, on the other hand -- as will become apparent in this sequel -- that the adulators of Chomsky share a group psychosis with millions of others who formerly worshipped pre-Chomskyites, like Lenin, Stalin, and other Marxist worthies, as geniuses of the progressive faith.
Now to the facts.
Chomsky’s little masterpiece, What Uncle Sam Wants, draws on America’s actions in the Cold War as a database for its portrayal as the Evil One in global affairs. As Chomsky groupies are quick to point out, a lot of facts do appear in the text or – more precisely – appear to appear in the text. On closer examination, every one of them has been ripped out of any meaningful historical context and then distorted so cynically that the result has about as much in common with the truth as Harry Potter’s Muggles Guide to Magic.
In Chomsky’s telling, the bi-polar world of the Cold War is viewed as though there were only one pole. In the real world, the Cold War was about America’s effort to organize a democratic coalition against an expansionist empire that conquered and enslaved more than a billion people. It ended, when the empire gave up and the walls that kept its subjects locked in, came tumbling down. In Chomsky’s world, the Soviet empire hardly exists, not a single American action is seen as a response to a Soviet initiative, and the Cold War is "analyzed" as though it had only one side.
This is like writing a history of the Second World War without mentioning Hitler or noticing that the actions of the Axis powers influenced its events. But in Chomsky’s malevolent hands, matters get even worse. If one were to follow the Chomsky method, for example, one would list every problematic act committed by any part or element in the vast coalition attempting to stop Hitler, and would attribute them all to a calculating policy of the United States. One would then provide a report card of these "crimes" as the historical record itself. The list of crimes – the worst acts of which the allies could be accused and the most dishonorable motives they may be said to have acted upon -- would then become the database from which America’s portrait would be drawn. The result inevitably would be the Great Satan of Chomsky’s deranged fantasy life.
In What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky begins with the fact of America’s emergence from the Second World War. He describes this fact characteristically as the United States having "benefited enormously" from the conflict in contrast to its "industrial rivals" -- omitting in the process any mention of the 250,000 lives America lost, its generous Marshall Plan aid to those same rivals or, for that matter, its victory over Nazi Germany and the Axis powers. In Chomsky’s portrait, America in 1945 is, instead, a wealthy power that profited from others’ misery and is now seeking world domination. "The people who determine American policy were carefully planning how to shape the postwar world," he asserts without evidence. "American planners – from those in the State Department to those on the Council on Foreign Relations (one major channel by which business leaders influence foreign policy) – agreed that the dominance of the United States had to be maintained."
Chomsky never names the actual people who agreed that American policy should be world dominance, nor how they achieved unanimity in deciding to transform a famously isolationist country into a global power. America, in short, has no internal politics that matter. Chomsky does not bother to acknowledge or attempt to explain the powerful strain of isolationism not only in American policy, but in the Republican Party – the party of Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations businessmen whom he claims exert such influence on policy. Above all, he does not explain why -- if world domination was really America’s goal in 1945 – Washington disbanded its wartime armies overnight and brought them home.
Between 1945 and 1946, in fact, America demobilized 1.6 million troops. By contrast, the Soviet Union (which Chomsky doesn’t mention) maintained its 2 million-man army in place in the countries of Eastern Europe whose governments it had already begun to undermine and destroy. It was, in fact, the Soviet absorption of the formerly independent states of Eastern Europe in the years between 1945 and 1948 that triggered America’s subsequent rearmament, the creation of NATO, and the overseas spread of American power, which was designed to contain an expansionist Soviet empire and prevent a repetition of the appeasement process that had led to World War II. These little facts never appear in Chomsky’s text, yet they determine everything that followed, especially America’s global presence. There is no excuse for this omission other than that Chomsky wants this history to be something other than it was. History has shown that the Cold War, the formation of the postwar western alliances and the mobilizing of western forces -- was principally brought about by the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. That is why the Cold War ended as soon as the Berlin Wall fell, and the states of Eastern Europe were freed to pursue their independent paths. It was to accomplish this great liberation of several hundred million people -- and not any American quest for world domination -- that explains American Cold War policy. But these facts never appear on Chomsky’s pages.
Having begun the story with an utterly false picture of the historical forces at work, Chomsky is ready to carry out his scorched earth campaign of malicious slander against the democracy in which he has led a privileged existence for more than seventy years. "In 1949," Chomsky writes -- reaching for his favorite smear – "US espionage in Eastern Europe had been turned over to a network run by Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front. This network was one part of the US-Nazi alliance…."
Let’s pause for a moment so that we can take a good look at this exemplary display of the Chomsky method. We have jumped – or rather Chomsky has jumped us – from 1945 to 1949, skipping over the little matter of the Red Army’s refusal to withdraw from Eastern Europe, and the Kremlin’s swallowing of its independent regimes. Instead of these matters, the reader is confronted with what appears to be a shocking fact about Reinhard Gehlen, which is quickly inflated it into a big lie – an alleged "US-Nazi alliance." The factoid about Gehlen, it must be said, has been already distorted in the process of presenting it. The United States used Gehlen -- not the other way around, as Chomsky’s devious phrase ("US espionage … had been turned over") implies. More blatant is the big lie itself. There was no "US-Nazi alliance." The United States defeated Nazi Germany four years earlier, and by 1949 – unlike the Soviet Union -- had imposed a democracy on West Germany’s political structure as a condition of a German peace.
In 1949, West Germany, which was controlled by the United States and its allies, was a democratic state and continued to be so until the end of the Cold War, forty years later. East Germany, which was controlled by the Soviet Union (whose policies Chomsky fails to examine) was a police state, and continued to be a police state until the end of the Cold War, forty years later. In 1949, with Stalin’s Red Army occupying all the countries of Eastern Europe, the Communists had established police states in each one of them and were arresting and executing thousands of innocent people. These benighted satellite regimes of the Soviet empire remained police states, under Soviet rule, until the end of the Cold War forty years later. The 2 million-man Red Army continued to occupy Eastern Europe until the end of the Cold War forty years later, and for every one of those years it was positioned in an aggressive posture threatening the democratic states of Western Europe with invasion and occupation.
In these circumstances – which Chomsky does not mention -- the use of a German military intelligence network with experience and assets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was an entirely reasonable measure to defend the democratic states of the West and the innocent lives of the subjects of Soviet rule. Spy work is dirty work as everyone recognizes. This episode was no "Nazi" taint on America, but a necessary part of America’s Cold War effort in the cause of human freedom. With the help of the Gehlen network, the United States kept the Soviet expansion in check, and eventually liberated hundreds of millions of oppressed people in Eastern Europe from the horrors of the Communist gulag.
Chomsky describes these events as though the United States had not defeated Hitler, but had made a pact with the devil himself to attack the innocent: "These operations included a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s." This typical Chomsky distortion of what actually took place is as bold a lie as the Communist propaganda the Kremlin distributed in those years, from which it is cynically cribbed.
Having equated America with Nazi Germany, in strict imitation of Stalinist propaganda themes, Chomsky extends the analogy through the whole of his fictional account of the episodes that made up the Cold War. According to Chomsky, establishing a Nazi world order – with business interests at the top and the "working classes and the poor" at the bottom -- was America’s real postwar agenda. Therefore, "the major thing that stood in the way of this was the anti-fascist resistance, so we suppressed it all over the world, often installing fascists and Nazi collaborators in its place."
Claims like these give conspiracy theories a bad name.
It would be tedious (and would add nothing to our understanding) to run through all of Chomsky’s perversely distorted cases, which follow the unscrupulous model of his account of the Gehlen network. One more should suffice. In 1947 a civil war in Greece became the first Cold War test of America’s resolve to prevent the Soviet empire from spreading beyond Eastern Europe. Naturally, Chomsky presents the conflict as a struggle between the "anti-Nazi resistance," and US backed (and "Nazi") interests. In Chomsky’s words, these interests were "US investors and local businessmen," and -- of course -- "the beneficiaries included Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers and the peasants…."
The leaders of the anti-Communist forces in Greece were not Nazis. On the other hand, what Chomsky calls the "anti-Nazi resistance" was in fact the Communist Party and its fellow-traveling pawns. What Chomsky leaves out of his account, as a matter of course and necessity, are the proximity of the Soviet Red Army to Greece, the intention of the Greek Communists to establish a Soviet police state if they won the civil war, and the fact that their defeat paved the way for an unprecedented economic development benefiting all classes and the eventual establishment of a political democracy which soon brought democratic socialists to power.
Needless to say, no country in which Chomsky’s "anti-fascists" won, ever established a democracy or produced any significant betterment in the economic conditions of the great mass of its inhabitants. This puts a somewhat different color on every detail of what happened in Greece and what the United States did there. The only point of view from which Chomsky’s version of this history makes sense is the point of view of the Kremlin, whose propaganda has merely been updated by the MIT professor.
A key chapter of Chomsky’s booklet of lies is called "The Threat of A Good Example." In it, Chomsky offers his explanation for America’s diabolical behavior in Third World countries. In Chomsky’s fictional accounting, "what the US-run contra forces did in Nicaragua, or what our terrorist proxies do in El Salvador or Guatemala, isn’t only ordinary killing. A major element is brutal, sadistic torture – beating infants against rocks, hanging women by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of their face peeled back so that they’ll bleed to death, chopping people’s heads off and putting them on stakes." There are no citations in Chomsky’s text to support the claim either that these atrocities took place, or that the United States directed them, or that the United States is in any meaningful way responsible. But, according to Chomsky, "US-run" forces and "our terrorist proxies" do this sort of thing routinely and everywhere: "No country is exempt from this treatment, no matter how unimportant."
According to Chomsky, U.S. business is the evil hand behind all these policies. On the other hand, "as far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the U.S., at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars." If these countries are so insignificant, why would the United States bother to treat them so monstrously, particularly since lesser atrocities committed by Americans – like the My Lai massacre – managed to attract the attention of the whole world, and not just Noam Chomsky? "There is a reason for that," Chomsky explains. "The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example (italics in original). If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, ‘why not us?’"
It’s an interesting idea. The logic goes like this: What Uncle Sam really wants is to control the world; U.S. control means absolute misery for all the peoples that come under its sway; this means the U.S. must prevent all the little, poor people in the world from realizing that there are better ways to develop than with U.S. investments or influence. Take Grenada. "Grenada has a hundred thousand people who produce a little nutmeg, and you could hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a mild social revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat." This is Chomsky’s entire commentary on the U.S. intervention in Grenada.
Actually, something quite different took place. In 1979, there was a coup in Grenada that established a Marxist dictatorship complete with a Soviet-style "politburo" to rule it. This was a tense period in the Cold War. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and Communist insurgencies armed by Cuba were spreading in Central America. Before long, Cuban military personnel began to appear in Grenada and were building a new airport capable of accommodating Soviet bombers. Tensions over the uncompleted airport developed between Washington and the Grenadian dictatorship. In the midst of all this, there was another coup in 1983. This coup was led by the Marxist Minister of Defense who assassinated the Marxist dictator and half his politburo, including his pregnant Minister of Education. The new dictator put the entire island – including U.S. citizens resident there -- under house arrest. It was at this point that the Reagan Administration sent the marines in to protect U.S. citizens, stop the construction of the military airport and restore democracy to the little island. The U.S. did this at the request of four governments of Caribbean countries who feared a Communist military presence in their neighborhood. A public opinion poll taken after the U.S. operation showed that 85% of the citizens of Grenada welcomed the U.S. intervention and America’s help in restoring their freedom.
There was no "threat of a good example" in Grenada and there are none anywhere in the world of progressive social experiments. There is not a single Marxist country that has ever provided a good example in the sense of making its economy better or its people freer. Chomsky seems to have missed this most basic fact of 20th century history: Socialism doesn’t work. Korea would seem an obvious model case. Fifty years ago, in one of the early battles of the Cold War, the United States military prevented Communist North Korea from conquering the anti-Communist South of the country. Today Communist North Korea is independent of the United States and one of the poorest countries in the world. A million of its citizens have starved in the last couple of years, while its Marxist dictator has feverishly invested his country’s scarce capital in an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program. So much for the good example.
In South Korea, by contrast, there are 50,000 U.S. troops stationed along the border to defend it from a Communist attack. For fifty years, nefarious U.S. businesses and investors have operated freely in South Korea. The results are interesting. In 1950, South Korea – with a per capita income of $250 was as poor as Cuba and Vietnam. Today it is an industrial power and its per capita income is more than twenty times greater than it was before it became an ally and investment region of the United States. South Korea is not a full-fledged democracy but it does have elections and more than one party and a press that provides it with information from the outside world. This is quite different from North Korea whose citizens have no access to information their dictator does not approve. Who do you think is afraid of the threat of a good example?
Communism was an expansive system that ruined nations and enslaved their citizens. But Chomsky dismisses America’s fear of Communism as a mere "cover" for America’s own diabolical designs. He explains the Vietnam War this way: "The real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved independence and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and if that worked, they’d try it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would pursue an independent path, and by then a significant area [of America’s empire] would have been lost." This is a Marxist version of the domino theory. But of course, America did leave Indo-China – Cambodia and Thailand included -- in 1975. Vietnam has pursued an independent path for 25 years and it is as poor as it ever was – one of the poorest nations in the world. Its people still live in a primitive Marxist police state.
After its defeat in Vietnam, the United States withdrew its military forces from the entire Indo-Chinese peninsula. The result was that Cambodia was over-run by the Khmer Rouge (the "reds"). In other words, by the Communist forces that Noam Chomsky, the Vietnamese Communists and the entire American left had supported until then. The Khmer Rouge proceeded to kill two million Cambodians who, in their view, stood in the way of the progressive "good example" they intended to create. Chomsky earned himself a bad reputation by first denying and then minimizing the Cambodian genocide until the facts overwhelmed his case. Now, of course, he blames the genocide on the United States.
Chomsky also blames the United States and the Vietnam war for the fact that "Vietnam is a basket case" and not a good example. "Our basic goal – the crucial one, the one that really counted – was to destroy the virus [of independent development], and we did achieve that. Vietnam is a basket case, and the U.S. is doing what it can to keep it that way." This is just a typical Chomsky libel and all-purpose ruse. (The devil made them do it.) As Chomsky knew then and knows now, the victorious Vietnamese Communists are Marxists. Marxism is a crackpot theory that doesn’t work. Every Marxist state has been an economic basket case.
Take a current example like Cuba, which has not been bombed and has not suffered a war, but is poorer today than it was more than forty years ago when Castro took power. In 1959, Cuba was the second richest country in Latin America. Now it is the second poorest just before Haiti. Naturally, Chomskyites will claim that the U.S. economic boycott is responsible. (The devil made them do it.) But the whole rest of the world trades with Cuba. Cuba not only trades with all of Latin America and Europe, but receives aid from the latter. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union gave Cuba the equivalent of three Marshall Plans in economic subsidies and assistance -- tens of billions of dollars. Cuba is a fertile island with a tropical climate. It is poor because it has followed Chomsky’s examples, and not America’s. It is poor because it is socialist, Marxist and Communist. It is poor because it is run by a lunatic and sadist. It is poor because in Cuba, America lost the Cold War. The poverty of Cuba is what Chomsky’s vision and political commitments would create for the entire world.
It is the Communist-Chomsky illusion that there is a way to prosperity other than the way of the capitalist market that causes the poverty of states like Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam, and would have caused the poverty of Grenada and Greece and South Korea if America had not intervened.
The illusion that socialism promises a better future is also the cause of the Chomsky cult. It is the illusion at the heart of the messianic hope that creates the progressive left. This hope is a chimera, but insofar as it is believed, history presents itself in terms that are Manichaean -- as a battle between good and evil. Those who oppose socialism, Marxism, Communism embody worldly evil. They are the party of Satan, and their leader America is the Great Satan himself.
Chomsky is, in fact, the imam of this religious worldview on today’s college campuses. His great service to the progressive faith is to deny the history of the last hundred years, which is the history of progressive atrocity and failure. In the 20th century, progressives in power killed one hundred million people in the attempt to realize their impossible dream. As far as Noam Chomsky is concerned, these catastrophes of the left never happened. "I don’t much like the terms left and right," Chomsky writes in yet another ludicrous screed called The Common Good. "What’s called the left includes Leninism [i.e., Communism], which I consider ultra-right in many respects…. Leninism has nothing to do with the values of the left – in fact, it’s radically opposed to them."
You have to pinch yourself when reading sentences like that.
The purpose of such Humpty-Dumpty mutilations of the language is perfectly intelligible, however. It is to preserve the faith for those who cannot live without some form of the Communist creed. Lenin is dead. Long live Leninism. The Communist catastrophes can have "nothing to do with the values of the left" because if they did the left would have to answer for its deeds and confront the fact that it is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Progressives would have to face the fact that they killed 100 million people for nothing -- for an idea that didn’t work.
The real threat of a good example is the threat of America, which has lifted more people out of poverty -- within its borders and all over the world -- than all the socialists and progressives put together since the beginning of time. To neutralize the threat, it is necessary to kill the American idea. This is, in fact, Noam Chomsky’s mission in life, and his everlasting disgrace.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=1018
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 10, 2001
ONE OF THE TYPICAL ILLUSIONS of the Chomsky cult is the belief that its imam and sensei is not the unbalanced dervish of anti-American loathing he appears to everyone else, but an analytic giant whose dicta flow from a painstaking and scientific inquiry into the facts. "The only reason Noam Chomsky is an international political force unto himself," writes a typically fervid acolyte, "is that he actually spends considerable time researching, analyzing, corroborating, deconstructing, and impassionately [sic] explaining world affairs." This conviction is almost as delusional as Chomsky’s view of the world itself. It would be more accurate to say of the Chomsky oeuvre -- lifting a famous line from the late Mary McCarthy -- that everything he has written is a lie, including the "ands" and "the’s."
Chomskyites who read "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky (Part I)" have complained that "there is not one single comment …that contradicts Chomsky’s research." Consequently, my refutation of Chomsky was not achieved "by reasoned argument or detailing the errors of fact or logic in his writings and statements, but by character assassination and the trivializing of Chomsky’s strongly held beliefs through accusations that they were unpatriotic."
I confess to being a little puzzled by this objection. Having described Chomsky’s equation of post-World War II America with Nazi Germany, it did not actually occur to me that additional refutation was required. Not, at any rate, among the sound of mind. It is true, on the other hand -- as will become apparent in this sequel -- that the adulators of Chomsky share a group psychosis with millions of others who formerly worshipped pre-Chomskyites, like Lenin, Stalin, and other Marxist worthies, as geniuses of the progressive faith.
Now to the facts.
Chomsky’s little masterpiece, What Uncle Sam Wants, draws on America’s actions in the Cold War as a database for its portrayal as the Evil One in global affairs. As Chomsky groupies are quick to point out, a lot of facts do appear in the text or – more precisely – appear to appear in the text. On closer examination, every one of them has been ripped out of any meaningful historical context and then distorted so cynically that the result has about as much in common with the truth as Harry Potter’s Muggles Guide to Magic.
In Chomsky’s telling, the bi-polar world of the Cold War is viewed as though there were only one pole. In the real world, the Cold War was about America’s effort to organize a democratic coalition against an expansionist empire that conquered and enslaved more than a billion people. It ended, when the empire gave up and the walls that kept its subjects locked in, came tumbling down. In Chomsky’s world, the Soviet empire hardly exists, not a single American action is seen as a response to a Soviet initiative, and the Cold War is "analyzed" as though it had only one side.
This is like writing a history of the Second World War without mentioning Hitler or noticing that the actions of the Axis powers influenced its events. But in Chomsky’s malevolent hands, matters get even worse. If one were to follow the Chomsky method, for example, one would list every problematic act committed by any part or element in the vast coalition attempting to stop Hitler, and would attribute them all to a calculating policy of the United States. One would then provide a report card of these "crimes" as the historical record itself. The list of crimes – the worst acts of which the allies could be accused and the most dishonorable motives they may be said to have acted upon -- would then become the database from which America’s portrait would be drawn. The result inevitably would be the Great Satan of Chomsky’s deranged fantasy life.
In What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky begins with the fact of America’s emergence from the Second World War. He describes this fact characteristically as the United States having "benefited enormously" from the conflict in contrast to its "industrial rivals" -- omitting in the process any mention of the 250,000 lives America lost, its generous Marshall Plan aid to those same rivals or, for that matter, its victory over Nazi Germany and the Axis powers. In Chomsky’s portrait, America in 1945 is, instead, a wealthy power that profited from others’ misery and is now seeking world domination. "The people who determine American policy were carefully planning how to shape the postwar world," he asserts without evidence. "American planners – from those in the State Department to those on the Council on Foreign Relations (one major channel by which business leaders influence foreign policy) – agreed that the dominance of the United States had to be maintained."
Chomsky never names the actual people who agreed that American policy should be world dominance, nor how they achieved unanimity in deciding to transform a famously isolationist country into a global power. America, in short, has no internal politics that matter. Chomsky does not bother to acknowledge or attempt to explain the powerful strain of isolationism not only in American policy, but in the Republican Party – the party of Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations businessmen whom he claims exert such influence on policy. Above all, he does not explain why -- if world domination was really America’s goal in 1945 – Washington disbanded its wartime armies overnight and brought them home.
Between 1945 and 1946, in fact, America demobilized 1.6 million troops. By contrast, the Soviet Union (which Chomsky doesn’t mention) maintained its 2 million-man army in place in the countries of Eastern Europe whose governments it had already begun to undermine and destroy. It was, in fact, the Soviet absorption of the formerly independent states of Eastern Europe in the years between 1945 and 1948 that triggered America’s subsequent rearmament, the creation of NATO, and the overseas spread of American power, which was designed to contain an expansionist Soviet empire and prevent a repetition of the appeasement process that had led to World War II. These little facts never appear in Chomsky’s text, yet they determine everything that followed, especially America’s global presence. There is no excuse for this omission other than that Chomsky wants this history to be something other than it was. History has shown that the Cold War, the formation of the postwar western alliances and the mobilizing of western forces -- was principally brought about by the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. That is why the Cold War ended as soon as the Berlin Wall fell, and the states of Eastern Europe were freed to pursue their independent paths. It was to accomplish this great liberation of several hundred million people -- and not any American quest for world domination -- that explains American Cold War policy. But these facts never appear on Chomsky’s pages.
Having begun the story with an utterly false picture of the historical forces at work, Chomsky is ready to carry out his scorched earth campaign of malicious slander against the democracy in which he has led a privileged existence for more than seventy years. "In 1949," Chomsky writes -- reaching for his favorite smear – "US espionage in Eastern Europe had been turned over to a network run by Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front. This network was one part of the US-Nazi alliance…."
Let’s pause for a moment so that we can take a good look at this exemplary display of the Chomsky method. We have jumped – or rather Chomsky has jumped us – from 1945 to 1949, skipping over the little matter of the Red Army’s refusal to withdraw from Eastern Europe, and the Kremlin’s swallowing of its independent regimes. Instead of these matters, the reader is confronted with what appears to be a shocking fact about Reinhard Gehlen, which is quickly inflated it into a big lie – an alleged "US-Nazi alliance." The factoid about Gehlen, it must be said, has been already distorted in the process of presenting it. The United States used Gehlen -- not the other way around, as Chomsky’s devious phrase ("US espionage … had been turned over") implies. More blatant is the big lie itself. There was no "US-Nazi alliance." The United States defeated Nazi Germany four years earlier, and by 1949 – unlike the Soviet Union -- had imposed a democracy on West Germany’s political structure as a condition of a German peace.
In 1949, West Germany, which was controlled by the United States and its allies, was a democratic state and continued to be so until the end of the Cold War, forty years later. East Germany, which was controlled by the Soviet Union (whose policies Chomsky fails to examine) was a police state, and continued to be a police state until the end of the Cold War, forty years later. In 1949, with Stalin’s Red Army occupying all the countries of Eastern Europe, the Communists had established police states in each one of them and were arresting and executing thousands of innocent people. These benighted satellite regimes of the Soviet empire remained police states, under Soviet rule, until the end of the Cold War forty years later. The 2 million-man Red Army continued to occupy Eastern Europe until the end of the Cold War forty years later, and for every one of those years it was positioned in an aggressive posture threatening the democratic states of Western Europe with invasion and occupation.
In these circumstances – which Chomsky does not mention -- the use of a German military intelligence network with experience and assets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was an entirely reasonable measure to defend the democratic states of the West and the innocent lives of the subjects of Soviet rule. Spy work is dirty work as everyone recognizes. This episode was no "Nazi" taint on America, but a necessary part of America’s Cold War effort in the cause of human freedom. With the help of the Gehlen network, the United States kept the Soviet expansion in check, and eventually liberated hundreds of millions of oppressed people in Eastern Europe from the horrors of the Communist gulag.
Chomsky describes these events as though the United States had not defeated Hitler, but had made a pact with the devil himself to attack the innocent: "These operations included a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s." This typical Chomsky distortion of what actually took place is as bold a lie as the Communist propaganda the Kremlin distributed in those years, from which it is cynically cribbed.
Having equated America with Nazi Germany, in strict imitation of Stalinist propaganda themes, Chomsky extends the analogy through the whole of his fictional account of the episodes that made up the Cold War. According to Chomsky, establishing a Nazi world order – with business interests at the top and the "working classes and the poor" at the bottom -- was America’s real postwar agenda. Therefore, "the major thing that stood in the way of this was the anti-fascist resistance, so we suppressed it all over the world, often installing fascists and Nazi collaborators in its place."
Claims like these give conspiracy theories a bad name.
It would be tedious (and would add nothing to our understanding) to run through all of Chomsky’s perversely distorted cases, which follow the unscrupulous model of his account of the Gehlen network. One more should suffice. In 1947 a civil war in Greece became the first Cold War test of America’s resolve to prevent the Soviet empire from spreading beyond Eastern Europe. Naturally, Chomsky presents the conflict as a struggle between the "anti-Nazi resistance," and US backed (and "Nazi") interests. In Chomsky’s words, these interests were "US investors and local businessmen," and -- of course -- "the beneficiaries included Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers and the peasants…."
The leaders of the anti-Communist forces in Greece were not Nazis. On the other hand, what Chomsky calls the "anti-Nazi resistance" was in fact the Communist Party and its fellow-traveling pawns. What Chomsky leaves out of his account, as a matter of course and necessity, are the proximity of the Soviet Red Army to Greece, the intention of the Greek Communists to establish a Soviet police state if they won the civil war, and the fact that their defeat paved the way for an unprecedented economic development benefiting all classes and the eventual establishment of a political democracy which soon brought democratic socialists to power.
Needless to say, no country in which Chomsky’s "anti-fascists" won, ever established a democracy or produced any significant betterment in the economic conditions of the great mass of its inhabitants. This puts a somewhat different color on every detail of what happened in Greece and what the United States did there. The only point of view from which Chomsky’s version of this history makes sense is the point of view of the Kremlin, whose propaganda has merely been updated by the MIT professor.
A key chapter of Chomsky’s booklet of lies is called "The Threat of A Good Example." In it, Chomsky offers his explanation for America’s diabolical behavior in Third World countries. In Chomsky’s fictional accounting, "what the US-run contra forces did in Nicaragua, or what our terrorist proxies do in El Salvador or Guatemala, isn’t only ordinary killing. A major element is brutal, sadistic torture – beating infants against rocks, hanging women by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of their face peeled back so that they’ll bleed to death, chopping people’s heads off and putting them on stakes." There are no citations in Chomsky’s text to support the claim either that these atrocities took place, or that the United States directed them, or that the United States is in any meaningful way responsible. But, according to Chomsky, "US-run" forces and "our terrorist proxies" do this sort of thing routinely and everywhere: "No country is exempt from this treatment, no matter how unimportant."
According to Chomsky, U.S. business is the evil hand behind all these policies. On the other hand, "as far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the U.S., at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars." If these countries are so insignificant, why would the United States bother to treat them so monstrously, particularly since lesser atrocities committed by Americans – like the My Lai massacre – managed to attract the attention of the whole world, and not just Noam Chomsky? "There is a reason for that," Chomsky explains. "The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example (italics in original). If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, ‘why not us?’"
It’s an interesting idea. The logic goes like this: What Uncle Sam really wants is to control the world; U.S. control means absolute misery for all the peoples that come under its sway; this means the U.S. must prevent all the little, poor people in the world from realizing that there are better ways to develop than with U.S. investments or influence. Take Grenada. "Grenada has a hundred thousand people who produce a little nutmeg, and you could hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a mild social revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat." This is Chomsky’s entire commentary on the U.S. intervention in Grenada.
Actually, something quite different took place. In 1979, there was a coup in Grenada that established a Marxist dictatorship complete with a Soviet-style "politburo" to rule it. This was a tense period in the Cold War. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and Communist insurgencies armed by Cuba were spreading in Central America. Before long, Cuban military personnel began to appear in Grenada and were building a new airport capable of accommodating Soviet bombers. Tensions over the uncompleted airport developed between Washington and the Grenadian dictatorship. In the midst of all this, there was another coup in 1983. This coup was led by the Marxist Minister of Defense who assassinated the Marxist dictator and half his politburo, including his pregnant Minister of Education. The new dictator put the entire island – including U.S. citizens resident there -- under house arrest. It was at this point that the Reagan Administration sent the marines in to protect U.S. citizens, stop the construction of the military airport and restore democracy to the little island. The U.S. did this at the request of four governments of Caribbean countries who feared a Communist military presence in their neighborhood. A public opinion poll taken after the U.S. operation showed that 85% of the citizens of Grenada welcomed the U.S. intervention and America’s help in restoring their freedom.
There was no "threat of a good example" in Grenada and there are none anywhere in the world of progressive social experiments. There is not a single Marxist country that has ever provided a good example in the sense of making its economy better or its people freer. Chomsky seems to have missed this most basic fact of 20th century history: Socialism doesn’t work. Korea would seem an obvious model case. Fifty years ago, in one of the early battles of the Cold War, the United States military prevented Communist North Korea from conquering the anti-Communist South of the country. Today Communist North Korea is independent of the United States and one of the poorest countries in the world. A million of its citizens have starved in the last couple of years, while its Marxist dictator has feverishly invested his country’s scarce capital in an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program. So much for the good example.
In South Korea, by contrast, there are 50,000 U.S. troops stationed along the border to defend it from a Communist attack. For fifty years, nefarious U.S. businesses and investors have operated freely in South Korea. The results are interesting. In 1950, South Korea – with a per capita income of $250 was as poor as Cuba and Vietnam. Today it is an industrial power and its per capita income is more than twenty times greater than it was before it became an ally and investment region of the United States. South Korea is not a full-fledged democracy but it does have elections and more than one party and a press that provides it with information from the outside world. This is quite different from North Korea whose citizens have no access to information their dictator does not approve. Who do you think is afraid of the threat of a good example?
Communism was an expansive system that ruined nations and enslaved their citizens. But Chomsky dismisses America’s fear of Communism as a mere "cover" for America’s own diabolical designs. He explains the Vietnam War this way: "The real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved independence and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and if that worked, they’d try it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would pursue an independent path, and by then a significant area [of America’s empire] would have been lost." This is a Marxist version of the domino theory. But of course, America did leave Indo-China – Cambodia and Thailand included -- in 1975. Vietnam has pursued an independent path for 25 years and it is as poor as it ever was – one of the poorest nations in the world. Its people still live in a primitive Marxist police state.
After its defeat in Vietnam, the United States withdrew its military forces from the entire Indo-Chinese peninsula. The result was that Cambodia was over-run by the Khmer Rouge (the "reds"). In other words, by the Communist forces that Noam Chomsky, the Vietnamese Communists and the entire American left had supported until then. The Khmer Rouge proceeded to kill two million Cambodians who, in their view, stood in the way of the progressive "good example" they intended to create. Chomsky earned himself a bad reputation by first denying and then minimizing the Cambodian genocide until the facts overwhelmed his case. Now, of course, he blames the genocide on the United States.
Chomsky also blames the United States and the Vietnam war for the fact that "Vietnam is a basket case" and not a good example. "Our basic goal – the crucial one, the one that really counted – was to destroy the virus [of independent development], and we did achieve that. Vietnam is a basket case, and the U.S. is doing what it can to keep it that way." This is just a typical Chomsky libel and all-purpose ruse. (The devil made them do it.) As Chomsky knew then and knows now, the victorious Vietnamese Communists are Marxists. Marxism is a crackpot theory that doesn’t work. Every Marxist state has been an economic basket case.
Take a current example like Cuba, which has not been bombed and has not suffered a war, but is poorer today than it was more than forty years ago when Castro took power. In 1959, Cuba was the second richest country in Latin America. Now it is the second poorest just before Haiti. Naturally, Chomskyites will claim that the U.S. economic boycott is responsible. (The devil made them do it.) But the whole rest of the world trades with Cuba. Cuba not only trades with all of Latin America and Europe, but receives aid from the latter. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union gave Cuba the equivalent of three Marshall Plans in economic subsidies and assistance -- tens of billions of dollars. Cuba is a fertile island with a tropical climate. It is poor because it has followed Chomsky’s examples, and not America’s. It is poor because it is socialist, Marxist and Communist. It is poor because it is run by a lunatic and sadist. It is poor because in Cuba, America lost the Cold War. The poverty of Cuba is what Chomsky’s vision and political commitments would create for the entire world.
It is the Communist-Chomsky illusion that there is a way to prosperity other than the way of the capitalist market that causes the poverty of states like Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam, and would have caused the poverty of Grenada and Greece and South Korea if America had not intervened.
The illusion that socialism promises a better future is also the cause of the Chomsky cult. It is the illusion at the heart of the messianic hope that creates the progressive left. This hope is a chimera, but insofar as it is believed, history presents itself in terms that are Manichaean -- as a battle between good and evil. Those who oppose socialism, Marxism, Communism embody worldly evil. They are the party of Satan, and their leader America is the Great Satan himself.
Chomsky is, in fact, the imam of this religious worldview on today’s college campuses. His great service to the progressive faith is to deny the history of the last hundred years, which is the history of progressive atrocity and failure. In the 20th century, progressives in power killed one hundred million people in the attempt to realize their impossible dream. As far as Noam Chomsky is concerned, these catastrophes of the left never happened. "I don’t much like the terms left and right," Chomsky writes in yet another ludicrous screed called The Common Good. "What’s called the left includes Leninism [i.e., Communism], which I consider ultra-right in many respects…. Leninism has nothing to do with the values of the left – in fact, it’s radically opposed to them."
You have to pinch yourself when reading sentences like that.
The purpose of such Humpty-Dumpty mutilations of the language is perfectly intelligible, however. It is to preserve the faith for those who cannot live without some form of the Communist creed. Lenin is dead. Long live Leninism. The Communist catastrophes can have "nothing to do with the values of the left" because if they did the left would have to answer for its deeds and confront the fact that it is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Progressives would have to face the fact that they killed 100 million people for nothing -- for an idea that didn’t work.
The real threat of a good example is the threat of America, which has lifted more people out of poverty -- within its borders and all over the world -- than all the socialists and progressives put together since the beginning of time. To neutralize the threat, it is necessary to kill the American idea. This is, in fact, Noam Chomsky’s mission in life, and his everlasting disgrace.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=1018
Filip_Antonio
New Member
Hanoi Chomsky
By Tim Starr
No Treason | February 11, 2003
"Yesterday and today, my friends and I visited Tanh Hoa province. There we were able to see at first hand the constructive work of the social revolution of the Vietnamese people. We saw luxurious fields and lovely countryside. We saw brave men and women who know how to defend their country from brutal aggression, but also to work with pride and with dignity to build a society of material prosperity, social justice, and cultural progress. I would like to express the great joy that we feel in your accomplishments.
"We also saw the ruins of dwellings and hospitals, villages mutilated by savage bombardments, craters disfiguring the peaceful countryside. In the midst of the creative achievements of the Vietnamese people, we came face to face with the savagery of a technological monster controlled by a social class, the rulers of the American empire, that has no place in the 20th century, that has only the capacity to repress and murder and destroy.
"We also saw the (Ham Ranh) Bridge, standing proud and defiant, and carved on the bills above we read the words, 'determined to win.' The people of Vietnam will win, they must win, because your cause is the cause of humanity as it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the socialist society in which free, creative men control their own destiny.
"This is my first visit to Vietnam. Nevertheless, since the moment when we arrived at the airport at Hanoi, I've had a remarkable and very satisfying feeling of being entirely at home. It is as if we are renewing old friendships rather than meeting new friends. It is as if we are returning to places that have a deep and personal meaning.
"In part, this is because of the warmth and the kindness with which we have been received, wherever we have gone. In part, it is because for many years we have wished all our strength and will to stand beside you in your struggle. We are deeply grateful to you that you permit us to be part of your brave and historical struggle. We hope that there will continue to be strong bonds of comradeship between the people of Vietnam and the many Americans who wish you success and who detest with all of their being the hateful activities of the American government.
"Those bonds of friendship are woven of many strands. From our point of view there is first of all the deep sympathy that we felt for the suffering of the Vietnamese people, which persists and increases in the southern part of your country, where the American aggression continues in full force.
"There is, furthermore, a feeling of regret and shame that we must feel because we have not been able to stop the American war machine. More important still is our admiration for the people of Vietnam who have been able to defend themselves against the ferocious attack, and at the same time take great strides forward toward the socialist society.
"But, above all, I think, is the feeling of pride. Your heroism reveals the capabilities of the human spirit and human will. Decent people throughout the world see in your struggle a model for themselves. They are in your debt, everlastingly, because you were in the forefront of the struggle to create a world in which the chains of oppression have been broken and replaced by social bonds among free men working in true solidarity and cooperation.
"Your courage and your achievements teach us that we too must be determined to win--not only to win the battle against American aggression in Southeast Asia, but also the battle against exploitation and racism in our own country.
"I believe that in the United States there will be some day a social revolution that will be of great significance to us and to all of mankind, and if this hope is to be proven correct, it will be in large part because the people of Vietnam have shown us the way.
"While in Hanoi I have had the opportunity to read the recent and very important book by Le Duan on the problems and tasks of the Vietnamese revolution. In it, he says that the fundamental interests of the proletariat of the people of all the world consists in at the same time in safeguarding world peace and moving the revolution forward in all countries. This is our common goal. We only hope that we can build upon your historic achievements. Thank you."
- Noam Chomsky, originally delivered on April 13, 1970 in Hanoi while he was visiting North Vietnam with a group of anti-war activists. Broadcast by Radio Hanoi on April 14, and published in the _Asia-Pacific Daily Report_ of the U.S. government's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, April 16, 1970, pages K2-K3.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6087
By Tim Starr
No Treason | February 11, 2003
"Yesterday and today, my friends and I visited Tanh Hoa province. There we were able to see at first hand the constructive work of the social revolution of the Vietnamese people. We saw luxurious fields and lovely countryside. We saw brave men and women who know how to defend their country from brutal aggression, but also to work with pride and with dignity to build a society of material prosperity, social justice, and cultural progress. I would like to express the great joy that we feel in your accomplishments.
"We also saw the ruins of dwellings and hospitals, villages mutilated by savage bombardments, craters disfiguring the peaceful countryside. In the midst of the creative achievements of the Vietnamese people, we came face to face with the savagery of a technological monster controlled by a social class, the rulers of the American empire, that has no place in the 20th century, that has only the capacity to repress and murder and destroy.
"We also saw the (Ham Ranh) Bridge, standing proud and defiant, and carved on the bills above we read the words, 'determined to win.' The people of Vietnam will win, they must win, because your cause is the cause of humanity as it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the socialist society in which free, creative men control their own destiny.
"This is my first visit to Vietnam. Nevertheless, since the moment when we arrived at the airport at Hanoi, I've had a remarkable and very satisfying feeling of being entirely at home. It is as if we are renewing old friendships rather than meeting new friends. It is as if we are returning to places that have a deep and personal meaning.
"In part, this is because of the warmth and the kindness with which we have been received, wherever we have gone. In part, it is because for many years we have wished all our strength and will to stand beside you in your struggle. We are deeply grateful to you that you permit us to be part of your brave and historical struggle. We hope that there will continue to be strong bonds of comradeship between the people of Vietnam and the many Americans who wish you success and who detest with all of their being the hateful activities of the American government.
"Those bonds of friendship are woven of many strands. From our point of view there is first of all the deep sympathy that we felt for the suffering of the Vietnamese people, which persists and increases in the southern part of your country, where the American aggression continues in full force.
"There is, furthermore, a feeling of regret and shame that we must feel because we have not been able to stop the American war machine. More important still is our admiration for the people of Vietnam who have been able to defend themselves against the ferocious attack, and at the same time take great strides forward toward the socialist society.
"But, above all, I think, is the feeling of pride. Your heroism reveals the capabilities of the human spirit and human will. Decent people throughout the world see in your struggle a model for themselves. They are in your debt, everlastingly, because you were in the forefront of the struggle to create a world in which the chains of oppression have been broken and replaced by social bonds among free men working in true solidarity and cooperation.
"Your courage and your achievements teach us that we too must be determined to win--not only to win the battle against American aggression in Southeast Asia, but also the battle against exploitation and racism in our own country.
"I believe that in the United States there will be some day a social revolution that will be of great significance to us and to all of mankind, and if this hope is to be proven correct, it will be in large part because the people of Vietnam have shown us the way.
"While in Hanoi I have had the opportunity to read the recent and very important book by Le Duan on the problems and tasks of the Vietnamese revolution. In it, he says that the fundamental interests of the proletariat of the people of all the world consists in at the same time in safeguarding world peace and moving the revolution forward in all countries. This is our common goal. We only hope that we can build upon your historic achievements. Thank you."
- Noam Chomsky, originally delivered on April 13, 1970 in Hanoi while he was visiting North Vietnam with a group of anti-war activists. Broadcast by Radio Hanoi on April 14, and published in the _Asia-Pacific Daily Report_ of the U.S. government's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, April 16, 1970, pages K2-K3.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6087
Filip_Antonio
New Member
Chomsky’s Smear of Horowitz an Expected Disgrace
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 26, 2001
DAVID HOROWITZ recently attacked Noam Chomsky in his column, The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky, in which he described the Leftist guru as a "pathological" "ayatollah of anti-American hate." Horowitz backed up his description with the evidence of how Chomsky hates himself and, therefore, his own society – which provides him with immense material and cultural rewards for doing so.
Asked about Horowitz’s attack, Chomsky replied, "I haven't read Horowitz. I didn't used to read him when he was a Stalinist and I don't read him today."
Chomsky’s smear-tactic is no surprise at all. It reveals two traditional methods by which the Left attacks the "enemies of the people": it dehumanizes them and tries to silence their voices.
Chomsky calls Horowitz a former Stalinist, but he knows full well that while Horowitz’s parents were Stalinists, Horowitz himself was never one. In 1956, after the famous Soviet 20th Party Congress (in which Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes), and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Horowitz helped contribute to the flowering of the "New Left," which saw itself as anti-Stalinist.
It was precisely his role in developing the "New Left" that allowed Horowitz to make a profound contribution to the historiography of the Left. After recognizing the perniciousness of the socialist idea, he demonstrated how it was the New Left’s project to rescue the Old Left -– without its Stalinist tinges. In the end, of course, Horowitz understood that this could not be done. In The Politics of Bad Faith, he provides a remarkable and original critique of the Left that analyzes its religious foundations, its philosophical roots going back to Rousseau and Marx, and its continuity through the New Left and post-Communist "progressive liberalism."
It becomes evident, therefore, that Chomsky’s smear of Horowitz emanates from Chomsky’s rage about what Horowitz has deciphered in him. Horowitz has perceived that the roots of the New Left, in which Chomsky has his feet solidly planted, are the same ones shared by the Stalinist Old Left. In other words, Chomsky is, at present, hurling an ugly insult that symbolizes the projection of self-hate.
Chomsky is, of course, just picking up where columnist Jack White left off. In the August 30 issue of Time magazine, White labeled Horowitz "a real, live bigot." He did this because of an article Horowitz wrote for Salon.com titled, "Guns Don't Kill Black People, Other Blacks Do." In that piece, Horowitz criticized the NAACP's lawsuit to hold gun manufacturers responsible for urban violence, since he believed Blacks had to accept individual responsibility.
When tiring of smearing Horowitz, the Left has attempted to silence him.
Eric Alterman’s "review" of Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith in The Nation on November 16, 1998 was especially illuminating in this regard. Alterman did not discuss a single idea in Horowitz’s book. Instead, after informing his readers that literary critic Paul Berman believed that Horowitz was a "demented lunatic," Alterman remarked that, "When Horowitz finally dies, I suspect we will be confronted with a posthumous volume of memoirs titled The End of History." The operative word here is "finally." Horowitz has obviously not died soon enough for many Leftists’ liking. A convenient gulag would have obviously remedied this problem a long time ago.
Just like Alterman, White also craved the silencing of Horowitz. While Alterman fantasized about Horowitz’s death, White concluded that, "we’d all be better off if he’d just shut up."
This phenomenon is very much connected to how the Left has consistently attempted to wipe Horowitz out of its own reality – as if he had never existed. Just as the Soviet regime consistently rewrote its own history and erased inconvenient individuals from its past, the Left has diligently ignored most of Horowitz’s scholarship.
But when the Left cannot ignore Horowitz’s voice, it tries its best to suffocate it. Chomsky has now joined the Alterman-White duo in that regard. By saying that he has never read Horowitz’s work (which is an outright lie), Chomsky is clearly entertaining the totalitarian fantasy of pushing Horowitz into invisibility.
Chomsky’s smear is ultimately about one dark reality: in confronting a former Leftist who has offered a sincere mea culpa to the world, Chomsky is forced to look at the last thing he wants to see in the world: a mirror. As a result, he quivers and shakes, froths at the mouth, and accuses Horowitz of having once been part of a monstrosity that he (Chomsky) himself has spent very little of his life denouncing –- for obvious reasons.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/Printable.asp?ID=239
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 26, 2001
DAVID HOROWITZ recently attacked Noam Chomsky in his column, The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky, in which he described the Leftist guru as a "pathological" "ayatollah of anti-American hate." Horowitz backed up his description with the evidence of how Chomsky hates himself and, therefore, his own society – which provides him with immense material and cultural rewards for doing so.
Asked about Horowitz’s attack, Chomsky replied, "I haven't read Horowitz. I didn't used to read him when he was a Stalinist and I don't read him today."
Chomsky’s smear-tactic is no surprise at all. It reveals two traditional methods by which the Left attacks the "enemies of the people": it dehumanizes them and tries to silence their voices.
Chomsky calls Horowitz a former Stalinist, but he knows full well that while Horowitz’s parents were Stalinists, Horowitz himself was never one. In 1956, after the famous Soviet 20th Party Congress (in which Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes), and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Horowitz helped contribute to the flowering of the "New Left," which saw itself as anti-Stalinist.
It was precisely his role in developing the "New Left" that allowed Horowitz to make a profound contribution to the historiography of the Left. After recognizing the perniciousness of the socialist idea, he demonstrated how it was the New Left’s project to rescue the Old Left -– without its Stalinist tinges. In the end, of course, Horowitz understood that this could not be done. In The Politics of Bad Faith, he provides a remarkable and original critique of the Left that analyzes its religious foundations, its philosophical roots going back to Rousseau and Marx, and its continuity through the New Left and post-Communist "progressive liberalism."
It becomes evident, therefore, that Chomsky’s smear of Horowitz emanates from Chomsky’s rage about what Horowitz has deciphered in him. Horowitz has perceived that the roots of the New Left, in which Chomsky has his feet solidly planted, are the same ones shared by the Stalinist Old Left. In other words, Chomsky is, at present, hurling an ugly insult that symbolizes the projection of self-hate.
Chomsky is, of course, just picking up where columnist Jack White left off. In the August 30 issue of Time magazine, White labeled Horowitz "a real, live bigot." He did this because of an article Horowitz wrote for Salon.com titled, "Guns Don't Kill Black People, Other Blacks Do." In that piece, Horowitz criticized the NAACP's lawsuit to hold gun manufacturers responsible for urban violence, since he believed Blacks had to accept individual responsibility.
When tiring of smearing Horowitz, the Left has attempted to silence him.
Eric Alterman’s "review" of Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith in The Nation on November 16, 1998 was especially illuminating in this regard. Alterman did not discuss a single idea in Horowitz’s book. Instead, after informing his readers that literary critic Paul Berman believed that Horowitz was a "demented lunatic," Alterman remarked that, "When Horowitz finally dies, I suspect we will be confronted with a posthumous volume of memoirs titled The End of History." The operative word here is "finally." Horowitz has obviously not died soon enough for many Leftists’ liking. A convenient gulag would have obviously remedied this problem a long time ago.
Just like Alterman, White also craved the silencing of Horowitz. While Alterman fantasized about Horowitz’s death, White concluded that, "we’d all be better off if he’d just shut up."
This phenomenon is very much connected to how the Left has consistently attempted to wipe Horowitz out of its own reality – as if he had never existed. Just as the Soviet regime consistently rewrote its own history and erased inconvenient individuals from its past, the Left has diligently ignored most of Horowitz’s scholarship.
But when the Left cannot ignore Horowitz’s voice, it tries its best to suffocate it. Chomsky has now joined the Alterman-White duo in that regard. By saying that he has never read Horowitz’s work (which is an outright lie), Chomsky is clearly entertaining the totalitarian fantasy of pushing Horowitz into invisibility.
Chomsky’s smear is ultimately about one dark reality: in confronting a former Leftist who has offered a sincere mea culpa to the world, Chomsky is forced to look at the last thing he wants to see in the world: a mirror. As a result, he quivers and shakes, froths at the mouth, and accuses Horowitz of having once been part of a monstrosity that he (Chomsky) himself has spent very little of his life denouncing –- for obvious reasons.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/Printable.asp?ID=239
Filip_Antonio
New Member
Doomie said:Filip, cred ca toata lumea a inteles deja ca nu-ti place de Chomsky. Nu e nevoie sa pui articole kilometrice pe-aici...
In momentul in care ai sa incetezi sa postezi articole favorabile acestui extremist de stanga, anti-american si antisemit, am sa incetez si eu.
Filip_Antonio said:In momentul in care ai sa incetezi sa postezi articole favorabile acestui extremist de stanga, anti-american si antisemit, am sa incetez si eu.
Am considerat ca are "dreptul la replica", so to say.
Filip_Antonio
New Member
Doomie said:Filip_Antonio said:In momentul in care ai sa incetezi sa postezi articole favorabile acestui extremist de stanga, anti-american si antisemit, am sa incetez si eu.
Am considerat ca are "dreptul la replica", so to say.
Dreptul la replica era al meu, caci, daca ai observat, threadul se deschide cu o recomandare de lectura a acestui propagandist abject al extremei stangi.
Filip_Antonio said:Dreptul la replica era al meu, caci, daca ai observat, threadul se deschide cu o recomandare de lectura a acestui propagandist abject al extremei stangi.
Am replicat la descrierea cartii, care este foarte one-sided.
Filip_Antonio
New Member
Iata ce postam pe yam.ro acum 2 ani si jumatate
Recitesc acum prefata la editia a treia a cartii lui Lucian Boia “Istorie si mit in constiinta romaneasca” si mi se pare extrem de relevanta pentru discutiile de pe forum. Scrisa in 2002, deci dupa revenirea la putere a regimului Iliescu, prefata se refera la ingerinta puterii in felul in care se scrie istoria.
Lucian Boia ataca problema si din perspectiva integrarii europene si scrie ca aceasta este o “casatorie din interes si nu din dragoste”. El; conchide “A trecut ceva vreme de la 1900 cand elita romaneasca iubea cu adevarat Occidentul, atasata nu in primul rand de bogatia, ci de valorile sale. Actuala clasa conducatoare este structural nationalista, dar angajata deja pe un drum obligat, care duce spre Occident”.
Aceasta face ca Puterea sa nu “lase in pace “ istoria. Si ca exemplu, Lucian Boia se refera la un interviu acordat in aprilie 2001 de Ioan Scurtu, director al Institutlui Nicolae Iorga si conilier presidential in probleme de invataman si cercetare care spunea, in Adevarul Literar si Artistic, care sunt cei patru “piloni” pe care se va baza proiectul istoric pe care-l sustine: vechimea, continuitatea, independenta si unitatea, adica, sustine Luican Boia EXACT aceeasi sustinuti in mod obsesiv in perioada ceausista. Iar despre orientarea istoricilor care gandesc altfel zice domnul Scurtu in acelasi interviu: “nu este intamplatoare, nu este modul gandirii catorva personae razlete ci este o actiune programata care – sub pretextul “demitizarii” – vizeaza minimalizarea si chiar distrugerea valorilor nationale”. Si Lucian Boia remarca aici mitul conspiratiei si psihoza conspitrativa, continuare a practicilor din vremea regimului national-comunist.
Aici as vrea sa fac o paranteza. Nu pot sa nu remarc o similitudine de abordare intre Ioan Scurtu si numerosi participanti la acest forum, care si-au facut educatia istorica in plin regim national communist sau ascultand Cenaclul Flacara pe unde scurte. Orice demitizare a istoriei oficiale este taxata drept anti-romanism, si calomniata drept o actiune subversiva, sustinuta de SIS, KGB, iudeo-masonerie, Birstein, Soros, Mossad, CIA si alte foruri mai mult sau mai putin reale. Pura coincidenta sau deformatie de educatie (citeste spalare pe creier).
Lucian Boia continua cu prezentarea ca exemplu a mitizarii lui Mihai Viteazul si a comemorarii grandomane a 400 de ani de la moartea domnitorului in august 2001. Scrie istoricul “ “Romanul” Mihai Viteazul trece cu mult inaintea “europeanului” Mihai (chiar cu o tenta “antieuropeana”, o data ce “ceilalti” se fac vinovati de esecul romanilor de la 1600 si de uciderea voievodului). Nu e cazul sa mai spun ca Europa era pe atunci un concept functional, in timp ce nu exista inca nici cuvantul “Romania”. Aceasta nu inseamna ca nu suntem atasati de ceea ce inseamna azi Romania: “dar lasati macar stramosii sa doarma-n colb de cronici”, vorba lui Eminescu.
Si mentinandu-se la capitolul Europa, Lucian Boia scrie: “ In toate aceste reconstituiri istorice, Europa apare ca o constructie straina: spre care ne indreptam, dar careia avem mereu cate ceva sa-i reprosam. Am remarcat o declaratie a primului ministru Adrian Nastase: e cazul, spunea el, ca marile puteri sa ajute Romania fiindca tot ele au nedreptatit-o in atatea randuri. Pana la marile puteri, cred ca si romanii s-au nedreptatit singuri nu in putine ocazii, iar de clasa lor conducatoare sa nu mai vorbim”.
Apoi Lucian Boia reaminteste de readucerea in prim plan a lui Ion Antonescu. Desi Adrian Nastase a explicat de ce Antonescu (considerat criminal de razboi in Occident) nu poate fi reabilitat in contextual actual, TVR I-a dat replica instantaneu prezentand un film din 1993 realizat de Sergiu Nicolaescu in care on Antonescu este prezentat intr-o lumina favorabila. Lucian Boia remarca faptul ca Antonescu se bucura de simpatie in randul clasei politice romanesti dar si in armata si mai ales in randurile PRM, unde istoricul Gheorghe Buzatu este senator si vicepresedinte al Senatului.
Lucian Boia scrie ca Gheorghe Buzatu prezinta echivoc si mai degraba bievoitor nu numai pe Antonescu dar si pe legionari, trecand sub tacere chiar asasinarea lui Iorga si “problema evreiasca”: “M-as fi asteptat la minimalizari sau justificari; solutia a fost insa mult mai radicala: subiectul a disparut, nu mai exista!”, scrie istoricul. Lucian Boia este de parere ca folosirea lui Mihai Viteazul si Antonescu este una conjuncturala: “Nu-mi vine totusi sa cred ca oamenii politici duc chiar atat de tare grija lui Mihai Viteazul si a Maresalului Antonescu. Ii utilizezaza, ca prin ei sa transmita mesaje, mult mai convingatoare decat rostite in nume propriu. Oamenii ar trebui sa invete sa se apere de manipularea prin istorie. Sa-si dea seama ca prin Mihai Viteazul recepteaza un mesaj de unitate nationala si mai ales de solidariate in jurul Puterii, iar prin Maresalul Antonescu – in varianta “Romaniei Mari” – un apel nationalist si autoritar.
Dupa ce se refera la disputa din jurul manualelor alternativa si aversiunea actualei puteri fata de ele, Lucian Boia conchide prefata editiei a treia a cartii sale: “ Din pacate, Romania nu-si va capata echilibrul istoriografic decat atunci cand va ajunge intr-o situatie de echilibru politic si economic. Cand nu vor mai actiona toate frustrarile care astazi isi cauta inca o compensare in istorie. In urma integrarii europene va disparea probabil si ratiunea de a fi a traditionalei dispute romanesti intre autohtonisti si “Europenisti” “. A bon entendeur salut.
Recitesc acum prefata la editia a treia a cartii lui Lucian Boia “Istorie si mit in constiinta romaneasca” si mi se pare extrem de relevanta pentru discutiile de pe forum. Scrisa in 2002, deci dupa revenirea la putere a regimului Iliescu, prefata se refera la ingerinta puterii in felul in care se scrie istoria.
Lucian Boia ataca problema si din perspectiva integrarii europene si scrie ca aceasta este o “casatorie din interes si nu din dragoste”. El; conchide “A trecut ceva vreme de la 1900 cand elita romaneasca iubea cu adevarat Occidentul, atasata nu in primul rand de bogatia, ci de valorile sale. Actuala clasa conducatoare este structural nationalista, dar angajata deja pe un drum obligat, care duce spre Occident”.
Aceasta face ca Puterea sa nu “lase in pace “ istoria. Si ca exemplu, Lucian Boia se refera la un interviu acordat in aprilie 2001 de Ioan Scurtu, director al Institutlui Nicolae Iorga si conilier presidential in probleme de invataman si cercetare care spunea, in Adevarul Literar si Artistic, care sunt cei patru “piloni” pe care se va baza proiectul istoric pe care-l sustine: vechimea, continuitatea, independenta si unitatea, adica, sustine Luican Boia EXACT aceeasi sustinuti in mod obsesiv in perioada ceausista. Iar despre orientarea istoricilor care gandesc altfel zice domnul Scurtu in acelasi interviu: “nu este intamplatoare, nu este modul gandirii catorva personae razlete ci este o actiune programata care – sub pretextul “demitizarii” – vizeaza minimalizarea si chiar distrugerea valorilor nationale”. Si Lucian Boia remarca aici mitul conspiratiei si psihoza conspitrativa, continuare a practicilor din vremea regimului national-comunist.
Aici as vrea sa fac o paranteza. Nu pot sa nu remarc o similitudine de abordare intre Ioan Scurtu si numerosi participanti la acest forum, care si-au facut educatia istorica in plin regim national communist sau ascultand Cenaclul Flacara pe unde scurte. Orice demitizare a istoriei oficiale este taxata drept anti-romanism, si calomniata drept o actiune subversiva, sustinuta de SIS, KGB, iudeo-masonerie, Birstein, Soros, Mossad, CIA si alte foruri mai mult sau mai putin reale. Pura coincidenta sau deformatie de educatie (citeste spalare pe creier).
Lucian Boia continua cu prezentarea ca exemplu a mitizarii lui Mihai Viteazul si a comemorarii grandomane a 400 de ani de la moartea domnitorului in august 2001. Scrie istoricul “ “Romanul” Mihai Viteazul trece cu mult inaintea “europeanului” Mihai (chiar cu o tenta “antieuropeana”, o data ce “ceilalti” se fac vinovati de esecul romanilor de la 1600 si de uciderea voievodului). Nu e cazul sa mai spun ca Europa era pe atunci un concept functional, in timp ce nu exista inca nici cuvantul “Romania”. Aceasta nu inseamna ca nu suntem atasati de ceea ce inseamna azi Romania: “dar lasati macar stramosii sa doarma-n colb de cronici”, vorba lui Eminescu.
Si mentinandu-se la capitolul Europa, Lucian Boia scrie: “ In toate aceste reconstituiri istorice, Europa apare ca o constructie straina: spre care ne indreptam, dar careia avem mereu cate ceva sa-i reprosam. Am remarcat o declaratie a primului ministru Adrian Nastase: e cazul, spunea el, ca marile puteri sa ajute Romania fiindca tot ele au nedreptatit-o in atatea randuri. Pana la marile puteri, cred ca si romanii s-au nedreptatit singuri nu in putine ocazii, iar de clasa lor conducatoare sa nu mai vorbim”.
Apoi Lucian Boia reaminteste de readucerea in prim plan a lui Ion Antonescu. Desi Adrian Nastase a explicat de ce Antonescu (considerat criminal de razboi in Occident) nu poate fi reabilitat in contextual actual, TVR I-a dat replica instantaneu prezentand un film din 1993 realizat de Sergiu Nicolaescu in care on Antonescu este prezentat intr-o lumina favorabila. Lucian Boia remarca faptul ca Antonescu se bucura de simpatie in randul clasei politice romanesti dar si in armata si mai ales in randurile PRM, unde istoricul Gheorghe Buzatu este senator si vicepresedinte al Senatului.
Lucian Boia scrie ca Gheorghe Buzatu prezinta echivoc si mai degraba bievoitor nu numai pe Antonescu dar si pe legionari, trecand sub tacere chiar asasinarea lui Iorga si “problema evreiasca”: “M-as fi asteptat la minimalizari sau justificari; solutia a fost insa mult mai radicala: subiectul a disparut, nu mai exista!”, scrie istoricul. Lucian Boia este de parere ca folosirea lui Mihai Viteazul si Antonescu este una conjuncturala: “Nu-mi vine totusi sa cred ca oamenii politici duc chiar atat de tare grija lui Mihai Viteazul si a Maresalului Antonescu. Ii utilizezaza, ca prin ei sa transmita mesaje, mult mai convingatoare decat rostite in nume propriu. Oamenii ar trebui sa invete sa se apere de manipularea prin istorie. Sa-si dea seama ca prin Mihai Viteazul recepteaza un mesaj de unitate nationala si mai ales de solidariate in jurul Puterii, iar prin Maresalul Antonescu – in varianta “Romaniei Mari” – un apel nationalist si autoritar.
Dupa ce se refera la disputa din jurul manualelor alternativa si aversiunea actualei puteri fata de ele, Lucian Boia conchide prefata editiei a treia a cartii sale: “ Din pacate, Romania nu-si va capata echilibrul istoriografic decat atunci cand va ajunge intr-o situatie de echilibru politic si economic. Cand nu vor mai actiona toate frustrarile care astazi isi cauta inca o compensare in istorie. In urma integrarii europene va disparea probabil si ratiunea de a fi a traditionalei dispute romanesti intre autohtonisti si “Europenisti” “. A bon entendeur salut.
Filip_Antonio
New Member
Doomie said:Filip_Antonio said:Dreptul la replica era al meu, caci, daca ai observat, threadul se deschide cu o recomandare de lectura a acestui propagandist abject al extremei stangi.
Am replicat la descrierea cartii, care este foarte one-sided.
Negi faptul ca Chomsky este extremist de stanga, anti-american si antisemit?