some have it heavy on Chomsky

June 17, 2002

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000155.html

My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky: Khmer Rouge, Faurisson, Milosevic

"Never get involved in a land war in Asia." "Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line." And now, "Never get involved in an argument over Noam Chomsky."

The Chomsky defenders--and there seem to be a surprisingly large number of them--seem to form a kind of cult. Arguing with them seems to be a lot like trying to teach Plato's Republic to a pig: it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig. But I've spent more than enough time on this over the past three months: time to let it out of the cage:

Consider Chomsky's claim that: "In the early 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients..." On its face this is ludicrous. When the United States selects clients for cynical great power reasons, it selects strong clients--not ones whose unarmed men are rounded up and shot by the thousands. And Bosnian Muslims as a key to U.S. politico-military strategy in Europe? As Bismarck said more than a century ago, "There is nothing in the Balkans that is worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." It holds true today as well: the U.S. has no strategic or security interest in the Balkans that is worth the death of a single Carolinian fire-control technician. U.S. intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was "humanitarian" in origin and intention (even if we can argue about its effect). Only a nut-boy loon would argue otherwise.

But whenever I ask the Chomskyites why he would claim that, "In the early 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the US selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients..." I get one or more of three responses:

• It was said in haste in an interview--it's not representative of his thought.
• Of course the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients for great power reasons! Mineral wealth! Oil pipelines!
• Yes, he's made some mistakes. And he refuses to back down or make concessions when he is wrong. But it's more than counterbalanced by the stunning quality of his insights!

Insights? Like his writing a preface for a book by Robert Faurisson--a guy whose thesis seems to be that "the alleged massacre in gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews is part of one and the same lie, a gigantic political and financial racket for the benefit of Israel and international Zionism"? Like his claiming in said preface that Faurisson seems to be "a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort"? Like his claims that he "know[s] very little" about Faurisson's work, has "no special knowledge" about the topics Faurisson writes about, and--as Jay Parini notes-- continues to "maintain to this day that he has never read anything by Faurisson that suggests that the man was pro-Nazi"? These are supposed to be high quality insights?

But whenever I ask the Chomskyites why he would claim that Robert Faurisson is a "relatively apolitical liberal," and how he could possibly manage to "never read anything by Faurisson that suggests that the man was pro-Nazi," I get one or more of three responses:

• What Chomsky wrote and said about Faurisson was written and said in haste, without proper reflection--it's not representative of his thought.
• Chomsky is quoted out of context: he's defending Faurisson's right to free speech according to the principles of Voltaire, not endorsing or defending Faurisson.
• Yes, he's made some mistakes. And he refuses to back down or make concessions when he is wrong. But it's more than counterbalanced by the extraordinarily good work he's done uncovering the cynical crimes of power-mad governments like the U.S. and Israel.

Which makes me ask, wouldn't it be better not to misrepresent Faurisson's beliefs? Not to claim that he is a relatively apolitical liberal? Not to say that you have seen no evidence that Faurisson is pro-Nazi? It is, after all, a much stronger defense of free speech to say that you are defending a loathsome Holocaust-denier's right to free speech because free speech is absolute, then to say that poor Faurisson--a relatively apolitical liberal--is being persecuted for no reason other than that some object to his (unspecified) "conclusions."

And uncovering the cynical crimes of mad governments? Take a look at Chomsky's 1979 After the Cataclysm:

If a serious study…is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered…that the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response…because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.… Such a study, however, has yet to be undertaken.

Reflect that it was published three full years after the Cambodian Holocaust of the Year Zero. Ask yourself whether this is an uncovering or a covering of the crimes of an abominable regime. But it gets worse. Go back to your Nation of 1977, and consider the paragraph:

...there are many other sources on recent events in Cambodia that have not been brought to the attention of the American reading public. Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing.

Of this, jamesd@echeque.com writes:

Sounds very impressive, does it not?  If... entirely respectable magazines denied the accusations that the Khmer Rouge had committed vast crimes... we cannot take seriously these allegations.... There must be some substantial evidence, presented by these magazines, that shows or strongly suggests that the refugees tales of terror were nonsense, right?... He claims that these are "conflicting reports" that justify disbelief in the alleged crimes of the Khmer Rouge....
In the case of the Economist, there are no [such] articles.... Presumably [Chomsky] refers to a letter to the Economist ... a letter replying to an entirely accurate article.... [T]his letter was indeed... ["provided"] by the Economist, but it is misleading to invoke [its] authority... the Economist opposes Chomsky's claims.
In the case of the Far Eastern Economic review the review did indeed publish an article that said almost, but not quite, what Chomsky represents it as saying.... Nayan Chanda ( Far Eastern Economic Review October 29 1976 ) does indeed doubt the refugees are telling the truth... but he... [presents no] evidence contradicting their stories. He does indeed say "thousands"... he does not say "at most in the thousands"... [he says] "the numbers killed are impossible to calculate."... Chomsky presented the Far Eastern Economic Review as confidently denying the possibility that the killings were vastly higher, but Chanda specifically denies such knowledge and confidence....
Chomsky lies by misdirection.... [H]e said "[provided]" to associate the authority of the Economistwith a letter to the editor... [he said] " at most in the thousands" as if it were a conclusion of an article... [in] the Far Eastern Economic Review....

I've looked through the Economist. If there's anything written by the Economist's staff that has evidence casting doubt on the Cambodian Holocaust, I missed it as well.

So why does Chomsky lie about the "highly qualified specialists"? The claim that it is "space limitations" rather than "nonexistence" that prevents their being named cannot be a claim made in good faith, can it? And why would anyone lie for Pol Pot, unless they were either a nut-boy loon or were being mendacious and malevolent in search of some sinister and secret purpose? But when I ask the Chomskyites why he would falsely claim in 1977 that accusations of Cambodian genocide had been disputed in the pages of the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review by "highly qualified specialists"judging "the full range of evidence" and that these highly-qualified specialists put a firm upper bound of "at most in the thousands" on Khmer Rouge executions, I get one or more of three responses:

• What Chomsky wrote and said about the Khmer Rouge was a mistake, but it's uncharacteristic of his work.
• Chomsky never said the Khmer Rouge were genocidal butchers, he only said that there wasn't conclusive evidence that they were genocidal butchers.
• When a serious study of the Khmer Rouge is carried out, we will learn that most of the evidence of their "crimes" was faked by the Vietnamese after their conquest of Cambodia

I can't see how anyone can make the second claim in good faith: Chomsky not only said that there wasn't conclusive evidence that the Khmer Rouge were genocidal butchers, he wrote--falsely--that there was reliable evidence that they weren't genocidal butchers.

And I don't see how anyone can claim that Chomsky's lies are "uncharacteristic" of his work. There are just too damned many of them.

I tried (unsuccessfully) to ascertain the reasons for the appeal of Chomsky--to people who don't believe that the Khmer Rouge are benevolent friends of humanity, that Robert Faurisson is an apolitical liberal, and that U.S. intervention in Bosnia was motivated by metal mines and pipeline routes, that is--once before.

a bit more of chomsky

Khmer Rouge Apologist Noam Chomsky: Unrepentant

Khmer Rouge Apologist Noam Chomsky: An Offense to all who died under Pol Pot

A Review of his record to date

By Nate Thayer

Professor Noam Chomsky is a brilliant man. He is without question the world’s leading scholar on linguistics, a long deserved tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and speaks 32 languages. He so dominates the international field of linguistics, that he created another school of linguistic theory for the purpose of encouraging debate within his specialty.

However Chomsky is best known as a very active political critic. He refuses to attach an ideology to himself, but has described his politics in their past as similar to an Anarchist.

He is too smart to simply not understand the political consequences he has made a career out of  espousing on the issue of culpability for crimes committed during Khmer Rouge rule. And they are nothing less than intellectually intentional, knowing lies designed to mislead people as to the true facts to further a pre-determined ideological agenda, parsing, obfuscating and intentionally deceiving people to wrongly attribute the origins, causes, responsibility and perpetrators of the Cambodian suffering. His writings on Cambodia have done more damage, through its surface logic, to allowing those responsible for mass murder to avoid facing justice, and to misdirect that responsibility on peripheral players in the 40 year old drama. Not only does he deem the architects of Cambodian suffering as the US government, but labels the intenrational independent media as willing accomplices.

In the June 25, 1977 issue of the “Nation” a popular left leaning magazine in the U.S., Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman authored “Distortions at Fourth Hand.”

In it, he denied the credibility of information leaking out of Cambodia of a bloodbath underway, and viciously attacked the authors of reportage suggesting many were dying and suffering under the Khmer Rouge. “The technical name for this farce is 'freedom of the press'. All are free to write as they wish: Fox Butterfield, with his ideological blinders, on the front page of the Times (daily circulation more than 800,000)…. that find only 'woes' and distress, reach a mass audience and become part of the established truth. In this way a 'line' is implanted in the public mind with all the effectiveness of a system of censorship, while the illusion of an open press and society is maintained. If dictators were smarter, they would surely use the American system of thought control and indoctrination…."

Chomsky called it "a campaign to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the role of the United States in a more favorable light. The drab view of contemporary Vietnam provided by Butterfield and the establishment press helps to sustain the desired rewriting of history, asserting as it does the sad results of Communist success and American failure. Well suited for these aims are tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove the evils of communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war and might interfere with future crusades for freedom."

"It is in this context that we must view the recent spate of newspaper reports, editorials and books on Cambodia, a part of the world not ordinarily of great concern to the press. However, an exception is made when useful lessons may be drawn and public opinion mobilized in directions advantageous to the established order. Such didacticism often plays fast and loose with the truth.” “For example, on April 8, 1977, The Washington Post devoted half a page to 'photographs believed to be the first of actual forced labor conditions in the countryside of Cambodia [to] have reached the West.' The pictures show armed soldiers guarding people pulling plows, others working fields, and one bound man (“It is not known if this man was killed,” the caption reads). Quite a sensational testimonial to Communist atrocities, but there is a slight problem. The Washington Post account of how they were smuggled out by a relative of the photographer who died in the escape is entirely fanciful. The pictures had appeared a year earlier in France, Germany and Australia, as well as in the Bangkok Post.” He suggested that “the series of pictures could have been taken in Thailand with the prime objective of destroying the image of the Socialist parties” before the election.” He continued: “Even if the photographs had been authentic, we might ask why people should be pulling plows in Cambodia. The reason is clear, if unmentioned. The savage American assault on Cambodia did not spare the animal population.

What did Chomsky say? and what are his effects?

Dispatches

Michael J. Totten

Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian

20 August 2012

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/noam-chomsky-last-totalitarian

My friend and colleague Benjamin Kerstein has published a number of books, and this summer he released what is perhaps the most blistering critique of the radical leftist ideologue Noam Chomsky ever to appear in book form. It’s called Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite and is a collection of essays, reviews, and take-downs that originally appeared on his blog of the same name during a three-year period from 2004 through 2007.

Share

inShare

Email

Print

I read most of the material in this book when it first appeared, and now I have it all in one place in trade paperback on my bookshelf. Kerstein and I discussed Chomsky and his new book last week.

MJT: What possessed you to spend three years writing about Noam Chomsky?

Benjamin Kerstein: That's a huge question, and lest people start thinking I'm completely obsessive, I should note that I was doing a lot of other things at the same time. The short answer is 9/11. I grew up in an extremely liberal community where Chomsky was very popular, and as soon as 9/11 happened I knew that all those people I used to know would go straight to him in order to find out what they should think about it, and what they would come back with would be very nasty indeed. I regret that I was proven absolutely correct in that. It was really a disgraceful display by some very disgraceful people. Chomsky had become quite marginal in the years before that, but after 9/11 the left disinterred him and put him back on a pedestal. The New York Times, for example, ran a ridiculously fawning profile of him. He was being mainstreamed again and I felt strongly that someone had to say something.

I like to think that I and the others who were speaking out against him managed to make a small difference. For years he was spewing this stuff out with basically no opposition at all. I hope we managed to give people some material that helped them apply some critical thinking to his claims.

MJT: Can you boil down your case against him into a couple of sentences or paragraphs?

Benjamin Kerstein

Benjamin Kerstein: There are a couple of main points that should be made. First, Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you've ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it's quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it. I don't think anyone ought to be allowed to get away with that kind of behavior.

Second, Chomsky is immensely important to the radical left. When it comes to American foreign policy he isn't just influential, he's basically all they have. Almost any argument made about foreign affairs by the radical left can be traced back to him. That wasn't the case when he started out back in the late '60s, but it is now.

Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian. Despite his claims otherwise, he's more or less the last survivor of a group of intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but when you look at the regimes and groups he's supported, it’s a very bloody list indeed.

Communism and fascism are obviously dead as the proverbial doornail, but I doubt the totalitarian temptation will ever go away. The desire for unity and a kind of beautiful tyranny seems to spring from somewhere deep in the human psyche.

Fourth—and this may be most important—he makes people stupid. In this sense, he's more like a cult leader or a New Age guru than an intellectual. He allows people to be comfortable with their prejudices and their hatreds, and he undercuts their ability to think in a critical manner. To an extent, this has to do with his use of emotional and moral blackmail. Since he portrays everyone who disagrees with him as evil, if you do agree with him you must be on the side of good and right. This is essentially a kind of secular puritanism, and it's very appealing to many people, for obvious reasons, I think. We all want to think well of ourselves, whether we deserve it or not.

There is an intellectual side to this, as well. You see it clearly in his famous debate with Michel Foucault. Chomsky says at one point that there is a moral and ethical order that is hardwired into human beings. And Foucault basically asks him, why? How do you know this hardwired morality exists? And even if it exists, how can we know that it is, in fact, moral in the first place? We may feel it to be moral, but that doesn't make it true.

Chomsky's answer is essentially: Because I believe it to be so. Now, whatever that is, it isn't thinking. In fact, it's an excuse for not thinking. Ironically, Chomsky later said that Foucault was the most amoral man he ever met, whereas I would argue that Foucault was simply pointing out that Chomsky's “morality” is in fact a form of nihilism.

I think people come to Chomsky and essentially worship him for precisely that reason. He allows them to feel justified in their refusal to think. They never have to ask themselves any difficult questions or provide any difficult answers. It’s a form of intellectual cowardice essentially, but I'm sure you can see its appeal.

Chomsky error

Winnipeg Free Press - ONLINE EDITION http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/Chomsky-was-wrong-about-Chavez-244026121.html

Chomsky was wrong about Chavez

By: Alan Furth

Posted: 02/6/2014 1:47 PM | Comments: 4

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/Chomsky-was-wrong-about-Chavez-244026121.html

Speaking at the United Nations in 2006, Hugo Chávez excoriated ex-U.S. President George W. Bush as "the devil." Chávez waved a copy of Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, catapulting the book onto Amazon’s best-seller list.

For his part, Chomsky has repeatedly stated that Chávez ushered a revolutionary break with Venezuela’s political past, especially regarding the social policies of the state toward the poor, echoing the foundational Chavista discourse of "Bolivarian revolution."

In an interview with Spanish newspaper Diagonal in March 2006, Chomsky declared that "for the first time, the country is using… energy resources for its development… in construction, health." Likewise, in a 2005 op-ed for Mexico’s La Jornada, he wrote "it is only now with President Chávez… [that] medicine has become something real for a majority of the poor."

Last month, speaking to Venezuelan economist Miguel Ángel Santos, Chomsky repeated his point: "For many years Venezuela was dominated by elites that… harvested all the benefits from the oil bonanzas while marginalizing the poor… Chávez came up against that."

Regrettably, Chomsky ignores basic facts of Venezuelan contemporary history. There is nothing revolutionary about the Chavista welfare state.

In Revolution as Spectacle, Rafael Uzcátegui, co-editor of Venezuelan anarchist newspaper El Libertario, presents reams of data showing that up until the early 1980s, when oil prices started a sustained decline that drained the Venezuelan state’s capacity to sustain the massive subsidies that appeased the masses since 1958 and ultimately led to the Caracazo (a wave of riots in 1989 where thousands were killed by the military under the second administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez) welfare policies were as ubiquitous, and at times more effective, than those of Chávez’s reign.

Let’s limit our look to the two areas mentioned by Chomsky, housing and health care (Uzcátegui applies a similar analysis to a wide range of welfare policies).

According to national census data, the state’s housing projects reduced shanty-town dwellings as a percentage of total housing from 37.18 per cent in 1961 to 12.56 per cent in 1990. Penetration of the electricity grid was 58.16 per cent in 1961 and 76.59 per cent in 1981. Access to running water increased from 46.7 per cent in 1961 to 68.74 per cent in 1981.

The Chávez administration built an average of 26,000 households per year between 1999 and 2008. The average for the 90s decade was a much higher 64,000 per year.

The Popular Clinics and Hospitals of the People created by the famous Barrio Adentro Mission, a program widely publicized as having secured hitherto unparalleled access to basic health care for the poor, are today unable to provide treatment for any ailment more complex than a broken bone.

For critical treatments, the people must rely on the old hospital network built during the Fourth Republic, which in 1980 reached one of the widest coverages of the region with 2.7 beds per thousand habitants, but today is basically in shambles.

This translated, among other tragedies, into poor women in Venezuela giving birth under inhuman conditions during the period 1998-2008, and a 16 per cent rate of maternal deaths due to clandestine abortions for 2010.

The flip side of Chomsky’s argument, that Venezuela before Chávez was dominated by elites harvesting most of the oil bonanza, is true, but irrelevant: Today’s Venezuela is still dominated by brave new elites, the so called boliborgoise, wealthy and powerful thanks to their connections to, or direct participation in, the all-powerful Bolivarian state.

Actually, the Chavista elite is much more corrupt, authoritarian and inept than their Fourth Republic predecessors. If the monopoly on the use of force and administration of justice is the defining feature of the state, Venezuela today can easily be described as a failed one: The country’s epidemic of violence netted almost 25,000 murders in 2013, more than 90 per cent unsolved.

Hugo Chávez was no revolutionary. He simply took the petro-statist social democratic model prevailing in Venezuela since 1958 to a whole new level. As Uzcátegui argues in his book, he masterfully executed the art of the demagogic spectacle like no one before him — spectacle that utterly mesmerized Noam Chomsky, despite his analytical and intellectual prowess.

Alan Furth is an economist and freelance writer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

—Center for a Stateless Society

Chomsky review

Noam Chomsky’s half-truths and distortions are still loved by the British Left

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/909/noam_chomsky_s_half_truths_and_distortions_are_still_loved_by_the_british_left/page/2

The Guardian has given one of its great heroes a platform to spout forth on the decline of American power and the manifold sins of its past, but it’s all subterfuge

Shine a light on Chomsky's arguments and they're likely to look a little different

Robin Shepherd, Owner / Publisher

On 17 February 2012 17:28

26

But, coming to the second noteworthy item, look how he presents a veneer of “evidence” to gloss over the absurdity of the comparison. Who says Suharto is like Hitler, Stalin and Mao? Why, none other than the CIA!

Usually, the CIA is presented as a propaganda machine. But when it suits his purpose – to promote Western self-loathing – it has suddenly become a reliable source. And yet, even that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Assuming Chomsky didn’t just make it up, who in the CIA said this and under what circumstances? A low level desk officer with left-leaning sympathies? A lone, but more senior staffer, making the comparison for shock value? Chomsky never tells us, rendering the evidential value of an already false proposition useless.