Are you serious? He has done a turn-about on the Left?
“Noam Chomsky !!!!!”
“Are you serious? He has done a turn-about on the Left?”
That was the take by certain journalists, but after having read Chomsky’s remarks myself, I see now that they were taken completely, and I mean COMPLETELY, out of context. He was actually comparing the rise of the TeaParty movement to the rise of Hitler, not the opposite as some of these journalists reported. The article I first read was here on FR, but I can’t locate it now. When I got your ping, I looked up Chomsky to get the exact text and about had an attack. Whoever it was that wrote it up as a defense of Palin and the Tea Party was nutz!
This is what they based their mistaken delight that Chomsky criticized obama and told people to pay more attention to the tea parties:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/04/17/chomsky-on-tea-party-dark-clouds-of-fascism-gathering/
Appearing in Madison,Wisconsin last week, Chomsky, who frequently observes of America that there is a permanent mass base for fascism, warned about the appeal of the Tea Party, though he shares many of their negative sentiments on the U.S. government.
“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.
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But THIS is what he meant::
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=218045
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like (suicide pilot) Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
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He states in other articles that IF a right wing charismatic leader, i.e., Sarah Palin, was to take over, we would have another Nazi Germany.
HE is insanely left wing.
I thought when I first read the article it didn’t smell quite right. I should have gone with my instincts and checked further.