Posted on 09/25/2001 10:09:39 PM PDT by VinnyTex
The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky Salon.com | September 26, 2001 WITHOUT QUESTION, the most devious, the most dishonest and -- in this hour of his nations 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 Americas 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 Chomskys 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 Chomskys 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, Chomskys 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 Chomskys 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 Americas 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, Chomskys response to Osama bin Ladens 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. Chomskys 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, Clintons 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 Americas 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 Clintons 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. Clintons 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. Chomskys 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 doesnt count in Chomskys 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 Chomskys 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 Ladens 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.
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. Americas 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. Thats 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 wouldnt 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 Chomskys 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 Clintons 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 Chicago 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 Chomskys lifelong righteous wrath. But he is too clever and too cowardly to admit it. He knows that, in the hour of the nations 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.
Chomskys 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. Chomskys 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 historys 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. Its time for Americans who love their country to stand up, and defend it.
(1)Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Tucson, 1986 (interviews with David Barsamian) (2)Ibid. (3)Noam Chomsky, Propaganda and the Public Mind, Interviews by David Barsamian, Cambridge, 2001 p. x. In the endpapers of this volume the NY Times is quoted praising Chomsky as "an exploder of received truths." The Guardian (London): "One of the radical heroes of our age A towering intellect " The Times Literary Supplement: "Chomskys work has some of the qualities of Revelations, the Old Testament prophets and Blake." (4)Available at www.znet.org (5)Interview, September 19, 2001. www.znet.org (6)What Uncle Sam Really Wants, pp. 8, 18, 29, 31, 32, 56-58 (7)Chomsky, Profit Over People, NY 1999, p. 102 (8)What Uncle Sam Really Wants, p. 32 (9)Ibid. p. 79 (10)Ibid. pp. 82 (11)Ibid. pp. 56-7 (12)Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days, NY 2001, p. 256 (13)Statement on the publishers website, www.beacon.org (14)What Uncle Sam Really Wants, p. 100
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I also recently read somewhere, perhaps it was at FrontPage, that Dohrn now holds an influential post at the American Bar Association.
Chomsky is the godfather of American de-constructionism.
I only wish he would de-construct himself! (That would be logical consistency).
Once again, HB, you are astute. And once again, we've hijacked the thread. As I did earlier with the McCarthy stuff, I will look into your suggestion to read Thomas Sowell.
As an aside - it is a pleasure debating here, the diversity of opinion on FR is impressive, and all-American! I was kicked off lucianne.com for debating unpopular views, so I appreciate the relative tolerance for baiting and devil's advocacy here, and the unmoderated free flow of discussion. (The admin at lucianne.com is power hungry!) I would also suggest to FR posters to try out liberal discussion groups and sites. You might find that they challenge some of your opinions, and strengthen some of your arguments. They are also, some might find surprisingly, a great deal more homogenous in opinion than FR is.
Thank you for doing so. Today a distant relative (not distant enough it seems) included me on her list of people she sent a bunch of similar Chomskyeske drivel to. She is of course a professor at a Colorado college. I'd bet by the response I sent her and all on her list, that I won't get any more e-mails!
We HAVE to be as vocal as they are and stand up and tell them what a bunch of bilge they are spewing. Who knows? At least one person might be really glad we did, it can really shock them that we don't "feel" like they do.
Crosstalk is a hallmark of FR's brand of discussion, as long as it stays somewhat on topic.
I don't think that's the primary reason...
One thing I noticed during my several years of heavy participation in talk.politics.guns is that the left has almost cornered the market on the fallacy of argumentum ad verecundium, the "Appeal to Authority".
They don't quote Chomsky et al because the quotes make a point particularly well (which is how the right usually employs quotes), instead they quote "authorities" under the belief that simply doing so trumps anything that their debate partners have to say.
It's not "Chomsky says this better than I could", it's "how can you possibly claim to be right when you disagree with an authority like Chomsky?"
It's not even "Chomsky already analyzed this so I don't have to". It's almost as if they don't even know how to begin to analyze an issue themselves, so they just choose which "authority" to believe.
One thing that struck me repeatedly when I was on talk.politics.guns was how often the anti-gunners smugly quoted an "authority", and how often they were unable to deal with any sort of reasoned rebuttal to what the "authority" had to say.
It's almost as if the anti-gunners believe that the proper way to formulate opinions is to decide whose bandwagon to follow, rather than rationally examine and understand the available facts and work out one's own reasoned conclusions. They were clearly blind followers, not independent thinkers.
Here's what I wrote back then:
And:On Thu, 11 Jun 1998 15:53:59 GMT, julia.cochrane@iint.com wrote: >thinks that working for Emory and publishing in big name medical >journals makes him "respectable"----and by that attitude she reduces >science to the level of theologians in the middle ages debating from >the scriptures how many teeth a horse had. [snip] >questions, but the person I spoke to, like others in her profession, >had the mistaken belief that science was about credentials rather than >rigorous application of a method for finding out about the world. I long ago noticed this same dynamic. A surprisingly large portion of anti-gunners, and practically all of the rabid ones, seem to get flustered if you try a logical argument on them, or ask them to supply one. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked (or insisted) that they make a case for their assertions, or provide any sort of supporting evidence, only to have them change the subject, get huffy, or launch into a hate-filled rant against us "gun loons". Instead of logic, they seem to rely on "argument from authority" (*their* "authorities") and "argument ad hominem" (against any opposing person or source). It all seems to be about blind faith in one set of folks and unceasing denigration of another set of folks.
It seems that the left's leadership understands this as well, which is why they rely so much on sloganeering to rally their followers, even when the content of the sloganeering wouldn't stand up to one minute of critical examination (e.g. "social security cuts", "tax cut for the rich", etc.) They know their followers have already decided whom to believe, and no amount of counterargument or disproof by the right will be able to put a dent in the sloganeering of the left's leadership.# There's also a lot of "argument by authority", which is one of the # ten or so classic logical fallacies. It's the one where someone says, # explicitly or implicitly, "this is true because so-and-so says so", # where "so-and-so" is some prominent person or organization. The # old "it's true because *I* say so" is another form of this. # # You'll note a lot of this in the anti-gun posts here. They'll wave # around the words of some dead Supreme Court justice, or court decision, # or "study", or anti-gun luminary, and when the idea is then challenged # on any sort of logical grounds, they'll huff and puff about how dare # we peons question such Words of Absolute Truth. This is also the case # when they say "I said it was so, what do you *mean* I need to support it?" # # This pattern is also why anti-gunners are so likely to try to slur # a pro-gun source, or a pro-gun poster -- to that sort of anti-gunner, # everything's a matter of who says so, and what their reputation is or # isn't. Heaven forbid anyone should actually apply *thought* and *data* # to resolve issues, rather than "my expert can beat up your expert" # (or "I'm brilliant and you're just a loon.") # # Thus their common attempt to "refute" the words of, say, Jefferson by # denouncing him as a dead slave-owning white guy, rather than taking the # time to deal with his words and ideas on their own merits.
Uhmm...their opposition was usually
communist, which got its funding
from the USSR. Do you think we
should be funding the commies now
that the Soviets can't?
When my brother graduated from college, (small East Coast private college) Noam was at the graduation ceremony to collect an honorary degree. You should have seen the Pres. of the college puckering up to that old coot's backside.
I told my family how awful I thought it was that this A-hole was getting a degree. They barely knew who he was, as did most of the famies there I would guess.
Given the amount of schmundo that parents spend on higer education, you wonder why they don't invest a little more time and effort to find out what their kids are actually learning.
Ridiculous. Horowitz has more than enough intellectual candlepower to "comprehend" Chomsky, as do most of the participants in this thread. Chomsky's work, even his "contributions" to linguistics, are not difficult to understand at all. It's just a matter of digging in and doing the work.
You may have a small point in charging that Horowitz "copped-out" by not doing the work, but you haven't a leg to stand on if you think Chomsky is some kind of genius above the comprehension of the average person.
Also Chomsky is not a stickler for facts, as you and some others in this thread have said. He distorts them mercilessly, and sometimes manufactures them, all with the goal of furthering the construction of his particular castle in the sky.
Not difficult, but boring, boring, boring.
I read a book of his once, never again!!!
Makes sense to me! The 60s culture lives on!
I don't find that at all surprising.
As to Chomsky and facts, there was quite a stir some years back about his denial of the Killing Fields in Cambodia long after he should have acknowledged the reality. I seem to have lost the links, I'll try to find them.
(BTW if there are awards for clever screen names you get my vote.)
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