hegemony or survival (chomsky)

[theBruiser500]

Am part way through this book by Chomsky and I like it a lot so far (once I got used to his style of writing - he uses a lot of big words). I like it because it takes a more objective view of our foreign policy. What do you guys who have read it think of it?

I have a more specific question though about his arguments. He keeps saying that we do a lot of agressive military stuff in Cuba, Nicaragua, Columbia, etc. because they are giving more power to the lower class in their society and that puts us (US, lol) in danger.

I'm only on page 100 and the answer could be past this part of the book but I think more likely than not I just missed his point on this. Could someone elaborate on this for me? I kind of get the general idea that we exploit everyone and we like other countries to be poor... or not egalatarian? Well, as you can see, I'm a little confused on this part.

[The once and future king]

Be prepared to be flamed/called a communist.

[ThaSaltCracka]

yeah because only damn dirty communist ask questions!!!!

[theBruiser500]

ah, i see.

[theBruiser500]

bump.

this is the most important thread on this forum, responses please.

[ThaSaltCracka]

If I knew more about it, I would engage, but I can bump and grind this thread for you. /images/graemlins/cool.gif

[J.R.]

I kind of get the general idea that we exploit everyone and we like other countries to be poor... or not egalatarian? Well, as you can see, I'm a little confused on this part.

You're confused because this is plain wrong, and that's why political sceince departments around the country have egg all over their face. Adam Smith was right over 200 years ago, trade benefits both countries and its in america's best economic interest to have developing/third world/ less advanced nations prosper, end of story. This north/south poly science worldview crap never dies.

And regardless of any ill-conceived efforts we make or that people believe we (americans) make, such as supporting coups and proping up dicators and using embargos, capitalism wins out. And that's good for everyone. Look at russia. No one ever said the transition would be smooth and easy, but its ineveitable, and russian people are better off for it. Its captialism, and its good.

[theBruiser500]

chomsky doesn't go into a lot of depth on his supporting points (book recommendations for more detail?) but according to chomsky - while the US opposed some communist countries like Cuba and Russia it also opposed developing democratic countries and i THINK examples of that would be columbia and nicaragua

[theBruiser500]

"And that's good for everyone. Look at russia. No one ever said the transition would be smooth and easy, but its ineveitable, and russian people are better off for it. Its captialism, and its good."

and also, this is getting off topic but while it might be good that russia is now a capatalist economy chomsky's point is that we can keep going for hegemony (shaping the world how we like) but this comes at the cost of our chances for survival. the more agressively we pursue hegemony with military means, the more provactive it is and the more likely there will be a big war .

[nicky g]

Yeah the Russians are way better off economically. Their GDP is still far lower than it was in 1990 and tens of millions are in dire poverty. Their country is effectively run by gangsters. So much better off.

[nicky g]

I think at least part of their motivation had to do with commercial interests; many of the coups etc followed attempts by countries to nationalise US owned businesses or change the terms of deals with US business. Much of it was simply about power; the US regarded Latin America as its backyard.

Meanwhile some moron just splits a pot with me after calling all-in with no outs to win and 3 to split .

[CORed]

[ QUOTE ]
Yeah the Russians are way better off economically. Their GDP is still far lower than it was in 1990 and tens of millions are in dire poverty. Their country is effectively run by gangsters. So much better off.

[/ QUOTE ]

I would say that Russia is ruled by different gangsters now than in 1990. If the figures for GDP prior to 1990 came from the Soviet government, they were very likely grossly inflated. I'm not going to argue that everything is wonderful in Russia right now, but I certainly wouldn't argue that the Russian people were better off under Communism.

[nicky g]

Economically there is no question that most Soviet citizens became much worse off after 1990. Whether they're worse off over all depends on your priorites I suppose. I agree with your comment about different sets of gangsters.

[riverflush]

It's very simple: Chomsky sees the U.S. as an aggressor (which I probably wouldn't argue against) AND an oppressor (which I would argue against). In his other works, he clearly lays himself out to be an anarcho-syndicalist; namely, in support of anti-capitalist reform of the wage system. He supports "direct action" of workers against the class-based, boss-structured work environment. He sees any gain or loss from businesses coming directly at the hands of workers, and instead, supports a worker-controlled economy...where, theoretically, workers would control more of the process of production. He is not friendly to capitalism.

It is in this context that he views the world's wars. He sees the United States as attempting to protect its class-based, capitalistic, rich-and-poor economy by aggresively intervening in countries that attempt to form a different societal structure . It's his "threat of a good example" theory. He believes that the United States is primarily interested in preventing any country from successfully developing independently from capitalism - which has prompted the U.S. to intervene to quell socialist or other movements around the globe. Hence the U.S. policy on Cuba, South America, etc. etc.

Essentially, Chomsky believes that all the U.S.'s military efforts are intended only to protect its economic and ideological interests globally.

[Oski]

[ QUOTE ]
Economically there is no question that most Soviet citizens became much worse off after 1990. Whether they're worse off over all depends on your priorites I suppose. I agree with your comment about different sets of gangsters.

[/ QUOTE ]

A short-sighted viewpoint.

[theBruiser500]

Thanks that helps to clarify, but could you be a little more specific. How specifically does our "sponsered terrorism" in Cuba or Nicaragua help us? (one part of this quesiton is htat someone said earlier the US wants other economies to be capatalist and flourishing so we can trade with them - our intervention in these places has devastated them, how does that help us?)

[riverflush]

[ QUOTE ]
How specifically does our "sponsered terrorism" in Cuba or Nicaragua help us?

[/ QUOTE ]

Good question. While I wouldn't call it "sponsored terrorism" I'm still unsure if all all our interventions in world affairs (militarily) helps us one bit. I'm not a supporter of the U.S. as the world's police officer. On paper, the more countries that support free trade, the better for everybody...but I'm not sure we can force people to open up their markets. If they want to live under socialism/communism, that's their right (and burden).

I differ from Chomsky greatly in that I support capitalism in its purest form...meaning economically free as socially free. To me there is no argument against the accomplishments of free trade and capital markets in the advancement of the human condition. I believe Chomsky is 180 degrees off from reality. His "workers" utopia will never exist because it turns the top down business structure on its head, which has yet to work in real practice. Years and years of economic experience go against Chomsky, yet he has a strong following. He's in the "we haven't really tried 'true socialism' yet" camp.

I'm not.

[J.R.]

I never said it would be or is easy or painless, but its shortsighted to compare Russia current, embryotic capitalist structure (which is devoid of an efficient/effective legal system to enforce econmic agreemnts) with its communist structure. Buts its clear that much of the economic data we have from russia's communist heyday is inaccurate and/or mistated, a great deal of the problems facing russia stem from communist failings (ie infrastructure (both physical and legal), education, job training, openeess to international markets and corruption), and its not entirely clear that the country is that much worse off than its was under the psuedo-communist regime, as many of the problems you cite were prevalent before and are unrelated to the privitization of russia's economy.

[J.R.]

chomsky's point is that we can keep going for hegemony (shaping the world how we like)

And this ignores the reality of market foprces, which win out and continue to do so, irresepcetive of american efforts to the contrary. America did some stupid things in support of misquided economic policies, and while it hasn't been a smooth transition, we weren't able to control many developing nations where we propped up dictators, supported coups, etc.

As evidence of america's eventual submission to market forces, look at american policy re: mexico, specifically in light of the adoption of NAFTA and our evolved perspective on illegal immigrant/migrant workers. Quite a change dictated by the market, not american foreign policy.

[nicky g]

[ QUOTE ]
Economically there is no question that most Soviet citizens became much worse off after 1990. Whether they're worse off over all depends on your priorites I suppose. I agree with your comment about different sets of gangsters.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



A short-sighted viewpoint.


[/ QUOTE ]

No, a statement of fact. Whether you believe they will eventually be better off is a different matter.

[Gamblor]

I wholeheartedly recommend you take the initiative to check his sources and question his facts.

I can't argue his conclusions, but the evidence he presents has been shown to be false by more than one "real" historian (as opposed to Chomsky, who is a "pop" historian).

[nicky g]

"I never said it would be or is easy or painless"

No, but you said that the Russians were better off. Economically the majority of Russians are worse off than they were before.

"its shortsighted to compare Russia current, embryotic capitalist structure (which is devoid of an efficient/effective legal system to enforce econmic agreemnts) with its communist structure. "

Then maybe you shouldn;t have made such a comparison. The "reforms"/privatisations should never have been made without proper insititions and legal frameworks being in place beforehand.

"Buts its clear that much of the economic data we have from russia's communist heyday is inaccurate and/or mistated"

Look, whether the Soviets overstated their GDP or not, no serious economists would argue with the fact that real GDP, whosever figures you use, fell enormously after 1990 and that inequality increased greatly, making the majority of Russian worse off.

"its not entirely clear that the country is that much worse off than its was under the psuedo-communist regime"

It is extremely clear that economically Russia and the majority of its citizens became much poorer after the fall of communism. Whether that will remain the case is a different argument. But to use Russia in its present state as an example of how people become better off under free market conditions is plain foolishness, whether or not the argument is broadly correct.

[nicky g]

World Bank figures for Russian GDP:

1992: US$442bn.
2002 US$347bn.

These are World Bank figures, not Soviet ones, and the first figure comes just after the beginning of the transition. So to argue that the fall was due to Soviet inflation of statistics is ridiculous.


World Bank Russia Statistics (http://www.worldbank.org/cgi-bin/sendoff.cgi?page=%2Fdata%2Fcountrydata%2Faag%2Frus _aag.pdf)

[Oski]

[ QUOTE ]
"I never said it would be or is easy or painless"

No, but you said that the Russians were better off. Economically the majority of Russians are worse off than they were before.

"its shortsighted to compare Russia current, embryotic capitalist structure (which is devoid of an efficient/effective legal system to enforce econmic agreemnts) with its communist structure. "

Then maybe you shouldn;t have made such a comparison. The "reforms"/privatisations should never have been made without proper insititions and legal frameworks being in place beforehand.

"Buts its clear that much of the economic data we have from russia's communist heyday is inaccurate and/or mistated"

Look, whether the Soviets overstated their GDP or not, no serious economists would argue with the fact that real GDP, whosever figures you use, fell enormously after 1990 and that inequality increased greatly, making the majority of Russian worse off.

"its not entirely clear that the country is that much worse off than its was under the psuedo-communist regime"

It is extremely clear that economically Russia and the majority of its citizens became much poorer after the fall of communism. Whether that will remain the case is a different argument. But to use Russia in its present state as an example of how people become better off under free market conditions is plain foolishness, whether or not the argument is broadly correct.

[/ QUOTE ]

You sound like a guy who would buy a car before the engine is installed, then complain you aren't going anywhere. Yes, ITS A FACT you were better off at the moment with your horse, but its short-sighted to judge the car until its finished.

So, you go back to using your horse and ten-years' later you again realize you need a car, but only now, you are ten-years' further behind.

[nicky g]

Most people who buy a car would make sure it had an engine first. Ten years later, Russia is still worse off. You can argue all you want that the free market will make people better off, and all you want that Russia will eventually benefit from the transition, but at the moment Russia can not remotely be construed as evidence that replacing state socialism with a free market economy helps people economically. What you believe will happen is not useful evidence until it does happen.

[J.R.]

"These are World Bank figures, not Soviet ones, and the first figure comes just after the beginning of the transition. So to argue that the fall was due to Soviet inflation of statistics is ridiculous."

They are soviet figures, don't be a fool. The world bank used data provided by the soviet government, just as it does with every other country. However, unlike with almost every other country, there was a less than ample supply of private data and less of an ability to corroborate/dicredit much of the statistics provided.

[nicky g]

"They are soviet figures, don't be a fool. "

The figures come from after the Soviet government no longer existed.

[Oski]

[ QUOTE ]
Most people who buy a car would make sure it had an engine first. Ten years later, Russia is still worse off. You can argue all you want that the free market will make people better off, and all you want that Russia will eventually benefit from the transition, but at the moment Russia can not remotely be construed as evidence that replacing state socialism with a free market economy helps people economically. What you believe will happen is not useful evidence until it does happen.

[/ QUOTE ]

You need to sell your horse to buy a car.

You think about the problem, and realize that the only cars available have a realistic chance of not being able to go faster than a horse - at least for a number of years. Of course, there is a chance the car will perform perfectly well for some, which is much better than the horse. If you are "saddled" with an underperforming car, you would then complain you aren't going as fast as your horse. Yes, ITS A FACT you were better off at the moment with your horse, but its short-sighted to judge the car until its finished, and reaches its full potential.

Instead, you decide buying a car is too risky, and keep your horse.

So, ten-years' later you again realize you need a car, but only now, you are ten-years' further behind. And the only cars available come with the same problems as before.

[nicky g]

"short-sighted to judge the car until its finished, and reaches its full potential."

And when exactly will that be?


"So, ten-years' later you again realize you need a car, but only now, you are ten-years' further behind. And the only cars available come with the same problems as before. "

It's more than ten years since the transition began. And GDP is still lower than it was before (note that under normal conditions it should not only not be lower, but be significantly higher). Maybe you should change your example to 20 years.

[Oski]

[ QUOTE ]
"short-sighted to judge the car until its finished, and reaches its full potential."

And when exactly will that be?


"So, ten-years' later you again realize you need a car, but only now, you are ten-years' further behind. And the only cars available come with the same problems as before. "

It's more than ten years since the transition began. And GDP is still lower than it was before (note that under normal conditions it should not only not be lower, but be significantly higher). Maybe you should change your example to 20 years.

[/ QUOTE ]

10 years is just fine ... After all, its just an analogy. Maybe you should take a laxative.

[nicky g]

I'm taking beer, hopefully that will help. BUt you must concede until what you claim will happen happens, Russia is simply not a good example of things improving after a free market transisition.

[ACPlayer]

He believes that the United States is primarily interested in preventing any country from successfully developing independently from capitalism - which has prompted the U.S. to intervene to quell socialist or other movements around the globe. Hence the U.S. policy on Cuba, South America, etc. etc.

TGhis is not quite correct. American foreign policy clearly demonstrates that we are not interested in promoting capitalism or democracy. We are far more interested in protecting the interests of our upper claases (corporate elite) in America by promoting our ecomomic colonization of the world (what is sometimes called globalization). These interests for example do not want free trade but trade that provides them with leverage, the US goverment is then happy to negotiate on behalf of the corporation with the rest of the world.

Now, I am not saying that the govt is wrong (or right) to promote the interests of the American corporation. Just that it is wrong to equate that with promoting capitalism. I do think it is wrong when it promotes corporate interests over the interests of the American people.

[Oski]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm taking beer, hopefully that will help. BUt you must concede until what you claim will happen happens, Russia is simply not a good example of things improving after a free market transisition.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think anyone has held it up as a shining example. Anyway, I certianly happy to concede as much. I am certainly more realistic, however, in acknowledging that progress requires struggle. The Russian Communist model wasn't exactly blowing anyone's doors off.

[nicky g]

"I don't think anyone has held it up as a shining example. "

This thread started because JR claimed things had gotten better for the Russians. Maybe they will, but they haven't.

" The Russian Communist model wasn't exactly blowing anyone's doors off. "

I did not mean to suggest otherwise.

[nothumb]

This is a pretty accurate presentation of Chomsky's basic ideas from someone who clearly doesn't agree with them. Good job. I don't agree 100% but it's a fair presentation.

Hey, this means that there's something Chomsky and Bush have in common - they both believe setting examples can be a major factor in geopolitical struggles! /images/graemlins/grin.gif

I tend to agree with Chomsky's analysis of our motives in most 3rd world nations. For the record, Bruiser, I think the biggest threat posed by dynamic, democratic populist movements is that they would try to protect workers and indigenous owners/residents of resource-rich areas from wanton exploitation. They would also try to prevent the profits from development from leaving their own countries, which is currently what tends to happen. This is my position, BTW, some people (like JR) don't think this is the case.

I don't have a lot of patience for the 'rising tide lifts all boats' argument. Even when GDP or income goes up in resource-exporting countries, it often does so in the same way it has here - with a few people getting most of it, and a lot of people getting less.

One thing Chomsky doesn't say - and any sensible person doesn't say - is that capitalism is purely evil, destructive, etc. Capitalism has created an explosion in the overall level of wealth in the world. It has brought on new technologies, medicines, etc. However, we have not as of yet figured out a way to sensibly manage this boom in production, preventing environmental destruction from taking place or protecting the rights, both legal and moral, of developing nations, poor people and indigenous cultures. A realistic look at capitalism must force one to conclude that we've got to find a way to stop the incredibly destructive wars and the rapid environmental deterioration that have come with it.

NT

[riverflush]

good post nothumb...

(I'm not anti-environment, btw, I now it's hard for people to believe that a capitalist cares about the environment, but I'm an outdoorsy guy)

[MMMMMM]

"It's very simple: Chomsky sees the U.S. as an aggressor (which I probably wouldn't argue against) AND an oppressor (which I would argue against). In his other works, he clearly lays himself out to be an anarcho-syndicalist; namely, in support of anti-capitalist reform of the wage system. He supports "direct action" of workers against the class-based, boss-structured work environment. He sees any gain or loss from businesses coming directly at the hands of workers, and instead, supports a worker-controlled economy...where, theoretically, workers would control more of the process of production. He is not friendly to capitalism."


Put another way, Chomsky is a communist crackpot.

[MMMMMM]

"Yeah the Russians are way better off economically. Their GDP is still far lower than it was in 1990 and tens of millions are in dire poverty."

Well whatever...at least they don't have to wait in line FOR HOURS to buy bread, or go on a waiting list for months to buy a crappy car or a washing machine.

"Their country is effectively run by gangsters."

Like it wasn't before?

[MMMMMM]

Sorry Nicky but I don't consider it "better off" to have to stand in line for hours to buy bread...no matter how much money you might have.

[MMMMMM]

Even if the GDP is genuinely lower (I'm not sure if it is or not), when you have to wait in line for every freakin' thing you want, well, that is as bad as making less money. Hell, in many ways it is worse.

By the way, China is cooking their own books right now as we speak.

[MMMMMM]

"Most people who buy a car would make sure it had an engine first. Ten years later, Russia is still worse off. You can argue all you want that the free market will make people better off, and all you want that Russia will eventually benefit from the transition, but at the moment Russia can not remotely be construed as evidence that replacing state socialism with a free market economy helps people economically. What you believe will happen is not useful evidence until it does happen. "


Nicky, you are making a fundamental error I believe in your presumptions about all of this GDP stuff.

Here's why: if Russian GDP is lower now than in 1990, that DOES NOT imply that the shift to capitalism caused the decline in GDP. Let's not forget that the reason the USSR fell apart was that it was going bankrupt. If the country was going bankrupt don't you think the people were getting poorer somehow too? Before the fall the USSR liquidated a lot of their massive gold reserves to meet their need for hard cash, causing the price of gold to sink.

10-1 their GDP would be even lower now if they had remained communist. The USSR had long been writing checks its future couldn't cash.

[Jimbo]

Nicky, here are some comparative statistics which have a great deal more meaning than your World bank reference.

GDP and the Real Growth Rate (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_rea_gro_rat&int=20&id=as&id=rs&id=uk&id=us )

I chose to compare the US, Australia, the United Kingdom and Russia. Guess who has the best GDP growth rate in 2002?

Jimbo

[theBruiser500]

[ QUOTE ]
I wholeheartedly recommend you take the initiative to check his sources and question his facts.

[/ QUOTE ]

how do you recommend i do that exactly? go to the original source on all his endnotes?

[theBruiser500]

[ QUOTE ]
Sorry Nicky but I don't consider it "better off" to have to stand in line for hours to buy bread...no matter how much money you might have.

[/ QUOTE ]

MMMMM, you really aren't in a position to say something like this until you've been very poor

[andyfox]

"the evidence he presents has been shown to be false by more than one "real" historian (as opposed to Chomsky, who is a 'pop' historian)."

References, please? Thanks.

[Chris Alger]

Oh yeah, like who?

This from the guy who slurs "real historians" when they pop his fantasies on the grounds that "books" generally shouldn't be trusted.

[Zeno]

It's not just 'evidence' but the background of how it is gathered. Many people marshal all kinds of figures, numbers, charts, and statistics - present these as 'facts' and then draw conclusions. Base, suposedly, on the data presented. We all you know that you can skew data by conveniently leaving some out and/or by gathering only 'evidence' that fits your own preconceived notions of the world. In fact your preconceived notions of the world at the outset can predispose you to be bias in gathering information, what needs to be found out, and deciding what it means and in presentation of your interpretations. I submit that most if not all of chmosky’s books have never been out for a peer review - a review before publication by someone that does not have his same views. Of course this is normal in the publishing world of popular books. But it is something that should be kept in mind least you think his popular works are ‘scholarly’.


I have always been leery of this man, chomsky (well to be honest, I am leery of almost everybody). I breezed through a part of one his books and the writing is dense and thick, with an unrelenting tone. He is a master propagandist - he has made good use of his linguistics studies that gave him an excellent background in style and word use for optimal persuasive techniques.

But I remain skeptical.

-Zeno

[Chris Alger]

U.S. policy is dedicated to the interests of those with the greatest influence on the making of policy. These tend to be elites: banks, corporations, shareholders, managers, senior bureaucrats, opinion makers and so forth, working through various lawy firms, consultants, think tanks, propagandists and other middle tier (although often very wealthy) professionals. These groups prefer to compete for political and economic power among themselves. (Actually, they proably each prefer having it all to themselves, but realize the impracticability). The corollary to this preference is for less influential sectors (the bottom 90% or so) to remain preoccupied with scraping out a living, being entertained, coping with social tensions and other distractions that render them incapable of exercising political power or much control over the wealth they create.

In the U.S., this preference for unfettered elite power is circumscribed to some extent by tradition and popular institutions, now on the decline but still influential. In the undeveloped world, popular institutions are less powerful. This is a huge benefit for America's elites and they very much want to keep it that way.

As a result, when foreign countries raise the threat of poular control over public resources, wealth redistribution and the like, the U.S. response is predictably hostile. When foreign countries contemplate the more extreme forms of this ethic or seek to institutionalize it, our response is more severe.

In the short term, such actions threaten the investment and exploitation opportunities in the country immediately affected. In the long run, any success such countries experience with alternatives to the model sketched above could spread to other countries, create widespread political opposition (which in turn could theoretically lead to military confrontation) and in the very long run actually undermine the U.S. domestic political consensus.

[J.R.]

I was talking about the inflated figures put out by the soviet government which you cited as indicative of the notion that Russia GDP was high under its communist regime.

Russia isn't rosy, but it wasn't before. I know russians who see hope in what was a culturally fatalistic soctiety. I know russians who embrace the chance to get out there and make something happen, who cherish the ability to empower themselves. Yes, Putin is essentially the head ganster and corruption is still rampant, but reforms are comming, wealth is accumulating, and physical and human resources have been freed up. Western culture and ideas are comming in, and regardless of the temporary reservations in light of the Yukos takeover, econmic capital is flowing into the country.

Ironically, the Yukos situation is one of the better things that have happened in russia, at least from a long run perspective, in that international pressure on Putin to establish the legal/government structure necessary to make foreign investment practicable and desirable, and Putin's slow recognition of the inevitablity of his nation's need for this international capital to support russia's economic growth and his own desire for power, prestige and success will only hasten this process.

Isolationism doesn't work, and things are heating up to the point that Putin's ability to exert control over all facets of his country (ir=e iron fist like control) is being weakened by market forces. Oil is a big resource the world wants/needs and russia has it, and Putin's government must and will acquise to greater international trade and more free market idealogies, such as in the recent move to reform Russia's social welfare system.

The country faces rebels and civil strife with breakaway republics, and is still suffering trying to work with the crubling infrastrutre left by the prior regime. But things are getting better and will undoubtedly continue to do so. It ain't pretty, it ain't easy and it ain't always fair or equitable, but neither is life and its better than what they had.

[nicky g]

Waiting in line for bread is better than not being able to afford any bread.

[nicky g]

I don;t see why your statistics have more meaningful; a one year GDP growth rate figure doesn't tell us that much. Here are some GDP growth rate statistics for the entire 1990s from the place I work; I can't link to them as you need to be a subscriber (you can go to Business Monitor (http://www.businessmonitor.com) to see the sort of stuff they do:

1991 -5.0
1992 -14.5
1993 -8.7
1994 -13.0
1995 -4.0
1996 -3.6
1997 1.4
1998 -5.3
1999 6.4

(1991 is the first year available)


You can see there's a lot of making up to do; for seven of the nine years the country experienced huge negative growth.

[nicky g]

"Let's not forget that the reason the USSR fell apart was that it was going bankrupt."

That's not entirely true; there were political as well as economic factors in play.

Look, you can argue if you want that they would have been worse off anyway, that they'll get better off etc; but the simple fact is economically the average Russian has not been better off since the collapse of of the USSR, which is all I said to begin with.

[theBruiser500]

thanks for the responses everyone

[sam h]

[ QUOTE ]
Adam Smith was right over 200 years ago.

[/ QUOTE ]

Smith didn't have much to say about international trade theory.

[ QUOTE ]
Trade benefits both countries and its in america's best economic interest to have developing/third world/ less advanced nations prosper, end of story.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sure, if the world worked like a simple economic model. And if markets weren't themselves political creations.

[ QUOTE ]
This north/south poly science worldview crap never dies.

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe on your level of understanding. But people in political economy moved past dependency theory a long time ago. You have no idea what you're talking about.

[ QUOTE ]
Look at russia. No one ever said the transition would be smooth and easy, but its ineveitable, and russian people are better off for it. Its captialism, and its good.

[/ QUOTE ]

They might be better off now. But that doesn't obscure the point that people there have been immiserated and the transition has been very rocky exactly because not enough attention was paid to the political side of things in the oohing and awwing over shock therapy.

[John Cole]

Chris,

Slight adjustment. Perhaps the other 65% eke out a living; another 25% barely subsist. Yet nary a word of real protest.

As the Reverend Ike put it: "Yes; you, too, can become a millionaire."

[J.R.]

All I'll say is I am painting in broad strokes, but

1) smith's basic premise on divison and specialization of labor, while very basic and rudimentary, is the basic idea upon which international trade theory is permised on.

2) of course the world is complex and we don't have perfect markets. I'll mention that even in light of the unquestioned millitary power of the the US, the economic power of the world is divided between the US, europe and northeast asia, and a case can be made that the most powerful one of these doesn't reside in the "west".

3) of course dependency notions are not at the forefront of political economic thinking, but its still a basic notion introduced to colege students around the country, and is an easy "first" stand many embryotic-liberal thinkers attach on to. Look at the WTO protestors, this is in large part their bag. And there is some truth in it, overly-simplistic it might be.

4) "But that doesn't obscure the point that people there have been immiserated and the transition has been very rocky exactly because not enough attention was paid to the political side of things in the oohing and awwing over shock therapy."

I agree that many of the transitions that arose as a result of the expansion of wetsern politco-economic/capitalist notions were flawed and things could have done better. But I don't think that its shock therapy that had resulted in the spread of this "idealogy". America isn't some travel salesman selling capitalism like snakeoil, and America isn't brainwashing the world or grabbing them by the balls and forcing capitalism down there throats. Capitalism happens, and will continue to do so. How this process unfolds is often creul, inefficient and exploitative, but it is not necessarily inherently so, and regardless of the manner the end result is inescapable. I am not a unabashed American defender of our efforts, especially in eastern europe and latin america.

Hegemony or Survival: Wash. Post Chomsky Q and A (http://www.chomsky.info/debates/20031126.htm)

"Washington, D.C.: While I may agree with you that the United States is interested in preserving the dominant paradigms within society (i.e. capitalism, positivism, functionalism), it seems too simplistic to say that the U.S. foreign policy is unilaterally trying to secure its own hegemonic status. I believe the recent events are just a phase and most foreign policy analysts (including the President) know that if we cannot get back on track with international agreements and foreign cooperation then our own way of life is in jeopardy. Is it always fair to portray the United States as the rogue hegemony in an integrated world that is constantly trying to balance global economic and physical security?

Noam Chomsky: I basically agree (though I might differ with you about the nature of the "dominant paradigms"), but do not understand why you are directing the question to me. That the current US administration has declared that it will unilaterally act to secure its hegemonic status, now and for the indefinite future, is not seriously in question. That's the way the National Security Strategy of Sept. 2002 was interpreted at once, e.g., in the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs. It was not only stated clearly, but accompanied by "exemplary actions" to make it clear that the goal was intended seriously. But is this a permanent commitment? I don't know anyone who believes that. I've certainly never suggested it. The reason why I write, speak, and engage in other activism about these matters is to seek policy changes, which presuppposes that they can be changed, exactly as you assume. I don't see what issue you are raising.



A lot of what I wrote is unfair and idiotic in the sense that its viewed an attempt to address chomsky notions, but my points were just a knee jerk reaction to what I perceived a simplistic explanation of why America is bad. Its obviously deeper than that, and I don't disagree with much of what chomsky thinks and writes, most notably his current views on bush administration policies. I can't imagine trying to get into chomsky/poltico- economic in an abbreviated message board format. I'll stop but the link is an interesting read.

[Zeno]

[ QUOTE ]
Yet nary a word of real protest.


[/ QUOTE ]

Against what exactly? I am not responsible for nor do I personally shoulder the burden of the entire planet, and I find the implicit guilt flung about by your post rather odd.


[ QUOTE ]
As the Reverend Ike put it: "Yes; you, too, can become a millionaire."

[/ QUOTE ]


I am also not personally responsible for the idiocy of the human race.

Le Misanthrope

[John Cole]

Zeno,

No implicit guilt. The protest should come from the 25%; however, here in America, everyone can succeed (so says the good Reverend).

I'm dropping hints here, so another allusion. This time Jimmy Cliff:

"They tell me there's a pie up in the sky
Waitin' for me when I die."

Who's the "They"?

[scalf]

/images/graemlins/blush.gif.they is white men..

gl

/images/graemlins/smirk.gif /images/graemlins/spade.gif

[Gamblor]

go to the original source on all his endnotes?

On many of them, especially more controversial assertions, yes.

[Gamblor]

In the endless predictions Chomsky has made, what was he ever right about?

[Zeno]

John,

Jimmy Cliff - The Harder They Fall. Was that the name of the song and the album? It's been a long time.

I'm testy. The last few days I have been trying to put down some of the religious fanatics polluting the psychology forum with their orthodox voodooism.

Yeah - 'They'. 'They' are annoying - Pie in the sky, indeed. Until the herd instinct is diminished in the human species ‘They’, from whatever flavor, will be in the lead. They are powerful. But they do come in different flavors and Colors.

Some protesting would be a good thing. It will accomplish little to nothing. But that should not stop people from trying I suppose.

-Zeno

[MMMMMM]

Well I have been very poor...not now, but I have been. And things that make you waste inordinate amounts of time are the kind of things that keep people poor.

[MMMMMM]

No Nicky, that isn't necessarily so.

I have not been able to afford bread before--I had nothing but dried Lima beans to eat for three days with not a dollar to my name. I was living alone in a cabin in a rural area with no automobile and the nearest little store was a 4-mile walk. To get to a real grocery store or the laundromat was an eleven-mile hike. I carried a sack of groceries back on my back those 11 miles. I was 18. I chopped firewood all winter for fuel. The winters often got very very cold and it still snowed in the month of May. There was no indoor plumbing other than a water pump in the kitchen sink. The outhouse was about 60 feet from the cabin. The cabin was not insulated. I lived like that for almost a year.

At least I could go out and work at digging clams or collecting fir tips to make a few bucks those days when I had not a dollar to buy bread--if my life had been spent waiting in lines then, I would have had neither any money nor any time to go out and make any money.

So maybe I have at least an inkling of what matters when you are poor--and I repeat, things that make you waste time are the biggest impediments of all to someone trying to rise out of being poor or being broke.

[MMMMMM]

All I'm saying is that if the average Russian is not better off nowat doesn't imply that that is due to the collapse of copmmunism and the institution of capitalism. As I said, they were on the way down anyway--and such a huge economic sn't turn around on a dime regardless of what economic system is being used.

[Cyrus]

"In the endless predictions Chomsky has made, what was he ever right about?"

So this is why "Chomsky is a pop historian"? Because he cannot make predictions about the future?? As opposed to "serious" historians, I guess, whose specialty is making preditions about the future, huh?

You have a completely convoluted understanding of what History is and what constitutes a good historian, my man, or good sources. But your fanatical, closed-minded, damn-all-else ideology should have already alerted everyone to this state of affairs.

[theBruiser500]

Gamblor could you please elaborate and be more specific.

[theBruiser500]

"I repeat, things that make you waste time are the biggest impediments of all to someone trying to rise out of being poor or being broke."

MMMMM, I ask this partly because it doesn't seem to mesh with what you say but mainly to draw out some information about you being so poor because it is interesting... The impression I get is that you had time to do stuff ("At least I could go out and work at digging clams or collecting fir tips to make a few bucks those days when I had not a dollar to buy bread") but just chose not to, because you were lazy? i don't know, i don't really understnad your situation

[Chris Alger]

As usual, we don't know what you're talking about. I don't recall Chomsky ever attempting to predict future events.

But you said "the evidence he presents has been shown to be false by more than one 'real' historian." More than one respondent has asked for your examples of Chomsky's alleged historical fabrications.

So before we answer your (ridiculous) questions, let's see you offer up some evidence, besides your usual unsourced cut-and-paste crap from the usual Zionazi websites.

Put up or shut up.

[Chris Alger]

You mean the white men that ran neither Jamaica nor its recording industry (the subject of the movie)?

Complaints about stifling dissent on the grounds that everything will work out as soon as you're dead have been common for a long time. Why is it that when black people make them, they have to be complaints about racism?

[John Cole]

Zeno,

"They" is religion. But it may also stand in for a host of other appartuses that obscure the real conditions of lived experience. How did you miss it, you heretic?

John

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
book recommendations for more detail?

[/ QUOTE ]
Hegemony or Survival is a collection of essays he's written in the last couple of years. They don't always coalesce into a flowing argument. My guess is that if you check the online footnotes he's liberally cited to his earlier works.

For more stuff by NC in general, try Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New Press, 2002). If you can find it, Language and Politics (ed. C.P. Otero, Black Rose, 1988) is also a compendium of Chomsky on multiple topics. Both, however, consist of interviews with footnotes added, as are a lot of the smaller books that have appeared in the last few years under his name. The Chomsky Reader (1987) includes some his best essays, especially about Vietnam, but you might find it dated.

As I recall, the best work that teases out the history of the role of public relations and propaganda in American politics (or which best answers the question: "why isn't any of this stuff on "60 Minutes"?), is Necessary Illusions (1989), which has excellent appendices. A lot of answers to the particular questions you've raised here can probably be found in Deterring Democracy, 1992 (I'm not sure. My copy is irretrievably lost somewhere in the basement).

The problem is that there's so much demand for his input that he doesn't have as much time to do the reflective essay writing he used to. For these, I'd recommend World Orders, Old and New, which came out around 1995. I think it's his best recent work. There is a very good analysis of the ideological crisis created by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and communism as a threat against which the population can be mobilized and forced to sacrifice.

Chomsky at his polemical best is probably Fateful Triangle. His best empircal work is Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman). For an amply documented survey of the U.S. role in the developing world during the 1960's and 1970's, the first volume of The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (1979, also with Herman). There are many specifics in this work along the lines you've been mentioning.

If you want to read something amazingly moving from his younger days, read American Power and the New Mandarins (1967). There's a considerable difference in tone, a greater sense of anguish and humanity. Many people complain (unfairly, IMO) that his more recent work is hard to read, not because it's truly difficult (it never is) but because it's oppresively pessimitic and exhausting.

He's less humorous now than he used to be. If you want to read something that I found side-splitingly funny at the time, find his review of Kissinger's memoirs (it's in Toward a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, from the Reagan era.

Z Net has excellent Chomsky sources and there's always the nutfest at alt.politics.noamchomsky.

[MMMMMM]

That is what I did that year: walked/hitchhiked miles to dig clams in the half-frozen tidal flats, collected fir tips in season; then worked at minimum wage as a mason-tender in the frigid Downeast Maine winter building a high school: an eleven mile walk-hitchhike to and from work every day---and often most or all of it was walk. Then later that year worked 84 hours/wk. at minimum wage all summer in a fish factory.

Point is that I didn't ALSO have to stand in line for hours just to buy bread, as people in the former USSR had to do.

The greatest impediments to getting ahead are things that make you waste time.

If I hadn't had to walk/hitch so far to get to work, or to do laundry, I could have gotten ahead sooner.

When I was playing low-limit poker and blackjack after a really horrid run at cards about 7 years ago which knocked me out of the mid-limit games, I had to make good use of nearly every minute I had. It took about 2 months of completely dedicated effort to build a $100 loan from a friend into a 7K bankroll (this was before online poker existed.) I simply couldn't have done it if I had to stand in line for hours just to buy the necessities of life.

So I'm saying that you can work your way out of being poor or broke. I'm also saying that being broke is a temporary state if you are dedicated to changing your condition--unless the government makes things so cumbersome that you can't overcome the extreme inefficiencies and the bureaucracy.

That is why, if forced to choose, I'd rather be poor and unencumbered, than to have some money and be permanently encumbered by things like long lines just to buy bread or soap, as in the former USSR. In the former case, you can work, scrimp and save your way out of it. In the latter case, you are stuck for life.

[The once and future king]

When you worked in that High school was not the government (Indirectly at least) your employer ?

Also had the pesky interfering gov not introduced minimum wage you might have been earning alot less.

[MMMMMM]

"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.

o 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."

o 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."

o 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."

o According to Chomsky, there is "a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid."

o 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)

o 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)

o 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/Printable.asp?ID=1020

"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/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1018

[theBruiser500]

Alger, thanks for the recommendations, and MMMM thanks for the story...

On a sidenote, as I'm reading this book I'm getting a little annoyed. I'm at a chapter on how bad Israel is now and since I've always thought Israel was treated unfairly by the press here and is being fair I'm reading this more critically. Here is what aggravates me about his style.

"Bush adminsistration... vetoed... Washington's Mitchell Plan and efforts to reduce violence by the dispatch of international monitors, to which Israel strongly objects: their presence is likely to reduce Palestinian violence but would also impede Israeli repression and terror" (177). I'd like to know more about the Mitchell Plan, more specifically how the internetional montiros work, what Israel says their objection to them is, why that isn't their real objection (and their real objection is that they want to repress and use terror), etc.

Or this, when he sites a source that argues for his side he will very often preface it like this, "the very well-informed Harvard University scholar Sara roy, relying on internel sources, writes" (175). Well, what internel sources? How is she well informed?

Is my critique of his writing justified?

[nicky g]

Israel has always rejected the presence of international monitors. Their argument is more or less that the international community is biased against Israel.

[theBruiser500]

I'll read the rest of that later but these first two paragraphs

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

just seems really stupid to me. It sounds more like vacuous propoganda than a real informative well reasoned article.

[nicky g]

"It sounds more like vacuous propoganda than a real informative well reasoned article"

Bingo

(No offence meant to you M. But that's what much of those frontpage and townhall writers are).

[adios]

Would you say the same thing about left wing sites?

[nicky g]

Which ones? Some, of course.

[adios]

..............

[Zeno]

John,

I responded allegorically. Perhaps I am not very good at it but I thought it was plain that I meant religion, and that it comes in many flavors and is propagated by people of all colors. It could also be taken to mean 'the controllers or the people in power'.

But on to a broader theme. I do not think Chomsky is saying anything new or even profound. If you think back to 1500 BC along any old river frontage by the Nile, Ganges, Yangtze, or the Tigris-Euphrates the same basic forces are at work. True, specifics and technology have change - but the some old voodoo is there.

But humanity is sick with more than just one disease. I think the animal needs to be shot and put down for its own good.

Heretic,

-Zeno ( Le Misanthrope )

[riverflush]

I'm going to chime in here:

Instead of simply dismissing David Horowitz because you see FrontPageMag.com or whatever and just know he's a right-winger, you should really look into just who David Horowitz is.

Horowitz is now persona non grata #1 for the American Left. Why? Because for years he was the voice of Marxist/Leftist theory within the United States - the premiere writer - until he gradually began to question the very philosophy he lived by and promoted. He's a fascinating American character. Throughout the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, Horowitz was considered a "genius" by all things left (much like Chomsky is today); he was revered on college campuses, his works were championed in NY Times reviews, he led marches and protests for socialist causes, etc. He was a hero.

Then, he flipped the script. As he got older, he began to question his Marxist/socialist beliefs. He saw real, vicious brutality brushed off all in the name of the "utopian ideal" of socialism. He began to see the fallacies inherent within his own philosophy...the undeniable facts of 20th century economic history. He began to question his side's undying loyalty to the (failed) Soviet ideal. He would eventually go quiet for nearly half a decade, eventually emerging as a "reformed" Marxist who "saw the light" on the other side. He would go on to become a champion of capitalism and free markets...but for this he paid a heavy price. His friend's disowned him. The NY Times refused to even acknowledge his new books. College colleagues became enemies overnight, simply because of his new economic/social philosophy. They called him a Nazi, wicked, a "sell-out," evil, etc. Instead of being celebrated on college campuses, he was now the center of violent protests.


Whether you agree with his views or now - or simply choose to dismiss them off hand - he is truly a fascinating figure in American political discourse...simply because he went from being nearly worshipped by the left...to Public Enemy #1 overnight.

His book, "Radical Son" is a very, very good read...even if you are a lefty...merely for the psychological aspects of his philosophy change and the subsequent backlash.

You can't simply dismiss Horowitz as propaganda because he doesn't play to your ideals...the fact is, the guy knows more about Marxism/Socialism/the American progressive movement than all of us here on 2+2 combined. He was once the leader of that very movement.

[Zeno]

[ QUOTE ]
Is my critique of his writing justified?

[/ QUOTE ]


Very much so. Remain Skeptical. And remember my post about peer review. Chomsky also cites his own previous works, nothing wrong with that really if all of his previous works had been peer reviewed by others. But they have not.

This calls for extra skepticism and a critical eye. It is easy to cite and quote people that already agree with your position or hold the same views as you do.

I must admit however that Chomsky is a master at what he does. Note his language and phrasing. Chomsky could easily start up his own religion. Perhaps in a way he already has.

-Zeno

[MMMMMM]

Well how about commenting further after you read the rest?

In particular I think it should be obvious that Chomsky does precisely what Horowitz describes him as doing: holding America up for criticism against idealistic utopian standards, whilst ignoring the fact that in the real world, other major powers have done, and continue to do, much worse than America.

This is not an argument that two wrongs make a right, but rather that actions must be judged in context and must be contrasted with contemporaries to derive meaningful real-world assessments.

Essentially, Chomsky applies one standard for judging America, whilst applying another standard to the judging of other world powers. He pays minimal lip service or honorable mention only to their much greater atrocities. In short, Chomsky's goal is to vilify America, and he accomplishes this by the tactics of attack outside of context and irrespective of real-world comparisons. Of course, he HAS to do this, or his entire thesis would fall apart if he once acknowledged the truth: that communism killed far more in the 20th century than capitalism, and that communism is responsible for far greater widespread horrors. How can a leftist truly admit this? But rather than renounce his leftist delusions, he prefers to demonize America.

It is also noteworthy that Chomsky fails entirely to speak of the great GOOD things which America has provided and done--and which must be weighed against any bad. So Chomsky is deceptive by ommission on two major counts: by criticizing America in a vacuum and irrespective of the concept of relative evil (e.g. failing to contrast America's evil deeds with those of her contemporary giant powers (USSR and China, which slaughtered over 80 million of their own citoizens in the 20th century)); and by failing to consider also the tremendous goods done by America and by the principles of democracy and liberty.

Noam Chomsky: master propagandist using the tools of selective research and selective dissemination of information; Stalinist; and one very sick self-hating fuk who hates America and hates Americans probably about as much as he hates himself. This guy hates the one country which has done more GOOD for the world than any other country, and hates most the one superpower which has not done nearly so much evil as have the former USSR and Maoist China.

Absolute fuking creep IMO. And thousands of naive college students subscribe to his views of the world without putting it all into context in the much larger picture...which is the ONLY way it can truly be objectively assessed.

How sad that such a deceitful character can mislead so many, and fail to sufficiently castigate the greatest evils which ever ruled large swaths of the world: Stalinist and Maoist communism. Chomsky is even a communist supporter. Sick sick sick fuking creep. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, so devastated and caused misery to vast portions of the human race as did 20th century communism. If you don't believe that I will gladly provide links.

[MMMMMM]

A couple of thoughts, John...

"Slight adjustment. Perhaps the other 65% eke out a living; another 25% barely subsist. Yet nary a word of real protest."

Has protest ever redressed the eternal human condition of worldly inequity?

Yet today in America, inequity is probably far less prevalent than it has generally been throughout the ages. Yet it was not protest that changed things; it was capitalism that did so, by greatly raising the overall standard of living and level of overall wealth. Poor people today in America (likely excepting only the homeless) generally have a considerably higher standard of living than did rich Americans of times past.



"As the Reverend Ike put it: "Yes; you, too, can become a millionaire.""


There is great and important difference between the following two statements:

1. "In America, anybody can become a millionaire"

2. "In America, everybody can become a millionaire"

The first statement is largely true; the second is not. I think that the first is what matters most.

[Chris Alger]

When you first posted this silly screed about a year ago, there were a number of thoughtful replies that tore it apart, particularly Andy Fox's point that when you strip out the venom, there isn't anything left. Yet you still have no response.

[ QUOTE ]
"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."


[/ QUOTE ]
This is just lying coupled with stupidity. Chomsky has never called the U.S. a great "Satan" or the "font of evil in the world." He has never applied a standard of responsibility to the US that differs from the standard the US applies to others. And he certainly has never suggested that the US is "responsible" for 9/11. Is there anything more absurd than snickering at those who would search for the "root causes" of terrorism? Horowitz is better advised to take up his complaint with the experts at the office of Homeland Security and the various intelligence services that take the causes of terrorism quite a bit more seriously than he does.

This is a typical example of the inability of the thick-skulled right to advance any kind of dialogue. They say the world is flat, people point out the truth and they respond: "Did you hear me? I said the world was flat!"

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
In particular I think it should be obvious that Chomsky does precisely what Horowitz describes him as doing: holding America up for criticism against idealistic utopian standards, whilst ignoring the fact that in the real world, other major powers have done, and continue to do, much worse than America.

[/ QUOTE ]
Again, the usual crap. Why don't you, for once, provide some example of Chomsky applying an "utopian" standards or respond to the many times he's acknowledged that the U.S. is not, in fact, the worst country in the world.

[Chris Alger]

In just which work or works by Chomsky that you've read do you find these tendencies most pronounced. I mean, you have read them, haven't you? Which ones?

[theBruiser500]

"Why don't you, for once, provide some example of Chomsky applying an "utopian" standards"

Yeah, I agree. I started this thread in part because I wanted some specific explinations or details. The posts so far have been pretty vague, it would be a lot more helpful to the debate if people could provide evidence (gamblor).

[theBruiser500]

"very sick self-hating fuk who hates America and hates Americans probably about as much as he hates himself.

Absolute fuking creep IMO"

This is all really unecessary and more importantly, I don't thinkt he point of his writing is to say that the US is the worst country ever, just that the US lies, is hypocritical and can be better (among other things). To respond to your points that the US is doing a good job right now, the main argument Chomsky is making I believe is this...

The US is pursuing imperilistic goals and since we use our military to do this, it provokes other countries and could possibly cause war. Maybe the US is doing good as you say MMMMM, but as Chomsky says "you ahve to consider the possible range of outcomes" and one of the possible outcomes of our hegemony policy is war where everyone dies - so we have to change our policies. Also, it's really stupid how you say he hates America. someone doesn't hate something just because they are critical of it, that is just silly.

[riverflush]

Bruiser500 and Chris Alger...

You are asking for examples of Chomsky's attacking of the United States as an "evil"...you are demanding that MMMMM provide examples, yet the examples you are looking for are present just a few scroll clicks up the post...in the writings of David Horowitz. He gives patent examples of exact quotes from Chomsky's works.

I get the feeling that you guys didn't even read these articles, just skipped right over them and went on the attack.

As I stated earlier, it is dishonest and self-serving to merely dismiss Horowitz...

There is always a lot of ad hominem attacks on the messenger in here, when in some cases you may find that you're answers are actually staring you right in the face. I've made a concerted effort to read the works of those who don't hold my worldview (capitalist libertarian), but I get the feeling that most of you guys simply ingest information that you already agree with and attack those that don't. That's no way to advance your own conscience.

[Zeno]

M,

Bruiser500 is correct in his follow on post - You did have to use that kind of language and tone. It is detrimental and undermines your own post and points. I was going to say something before but did not want to get in-between. But since Brusier500 responded, I wanted to add my voice to his. No need for this tone in this discussion; it is unnecessary.

Hate destroys minds. Don't let it destroy yours.

-Zeno

[MMMMMM]

Chomsky's aim seems to be to demonize America, and lay the cause of the world's ills at her feet. Methinks there are far more worthy candidates for such targeting. I regard his aim as being not constructive, but rather destructive, criticism.

Furthermore, the US is NOT pursuing imperialist goals. This should be apparent since the US does not thirst for territory. The US likes to see the spread of democracy and liberty, which benefits all participants.

Also, I rarely use such tone--but I guess I feel it is appropriate in Chomsky's case. Anyone who hates America more than the former USSR or Red China is either too
young to know better, or is pretty sick. There is simply no comparison between the different magnitudes of evil.

[MMMMMM]

That Chomsky repeatedly attacks the US entirely outside of meaningful context or comparison is evidence of an implied imaginary or utopian standard--as opposed to a real-world standard.

[MMMMMM]

I've read enough excerpted paragraphs and pages of Chomsky to formulate a pretty good idea of what he is about. That, and perhaps a dozen articles about his works--not all by Horowitz, by the way;-)

Am I being unfair to Chomsky? Well, maybe so. Yet he revolts me so that I perhaps I am less worried about that than I should be.

[MMMMMM]

Chris,

There ARE good points made in the article...if you care to get to them.

By the way, a year or so ago I posted a bettter article rebutting Chomsky--but I could not find it today. Perhaps Zeno would recall its title.

[MMMMMM]

I feel that Chomskly is deliberately poisoning the minds of young Americans with his highly biased, virulently anti-American propaganda.

Zeno, you have in the past called Chomsky a charlatan, a propagandist, a deceiver. In my view, he is all those things--and what is bad too, he is also quite pernicious in effect. He deliberately presents a hugely unbalanced view of the world to naive college types--and many of them end up hating America because they have been spoon-fed all the wrongs America has done, without putting things in context and without comparisons to the histories of other huge powers. Due to Chomsky's propagandist-style approach, many more Americans hate America than otherwise would--and much of that hatred is unwarranted.

I think anyone deliberately miseducating with propagandistic intent is a creep. I think Chomsky is sick in his loathing of America. Therefore, I think he is a sick creep. I added the fukin because he favors communism over capitalism when everything in history has shown that communism is infinitely more pernicious. So he is, overall and IMO, a sick fukin' creep.

I do appreciate the warning about hatred. I would hope however that I am capable of feeling and relatin scorn without letting hatred destroy me.

[Chris Alger]

In other words, you can't come up with any examples and resort to your usual hypocritical standard: it is correct for the American right to castigate the demons of the international world on their own terms, without "comparison evidence" of worse atrocities by the U.S. or others. When criticizing the U.S., however, we must dredge up the ghosts of Stalin or Ghengis Khan to show that any evil we're responsible for is somehow not as bad as evil gets. Then we can use this "comparison evidence" as an excuse to avoid responsibility for anything we wish.

It's the same argument you made about Abu Ghraib: the media should accompany the pictures of U.S. torture with irrelevant pictures of torture by Saddam to prove that everything we do can, no matter how cruel or unecessary, can be morally discounted as a lesser evil.

So the difference between you and Chomsky, once we strip away your invective and insulting rhetoric, is that he believes in individual and collective moral responsibility. You only believe in this concept as it applies to the other guy or nation. For those of us that try to apply it to the U.S., you feel licensed to accuse us of anti-Americanism, communism, self-hatred, etc.

[Chris Alger]

The guy writes maybe 20 books on U.S. foreign policy over more than three decades, and all you've bothered to read are "excerpted paragraphs and pages." On this basis you feel entitled to characterize everything he's written as one long baseless anti-American rant, driven by nothing but hatred, the delusions of a "sik fuk" mind. Startling, but probably only interesting to pathologists.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
You are asking for examples of Chomsky's attacking of the United States as an "evil"...

[/ QUOTE ]
I didn't say or imply this. I know perfectly well that the U.S., like nearly every other powerful state in the past, is and has been guilty of terrible evils. Try disputing this and see how far you get.

I asked for examples of Chomsky demanding that the U.S. comply with "utopian" standards or refusing to concede that other wrongdoers in the world actually exist. Looking at the excertps again, there is nothing in either article that comes close.

Maybe you could provide a short example of what you're talking about.

[MMMMMM]

You have ever misunderstood me on these sorts of points.

Chomsky believes in the U.S. taking responsibility for those things the US has done wrong--plus, apparently, for those things any allies or clients of the US have done wrong. I do not see him assigning much in the way of responsibility to America's enemies, though.

I have never said the US should be absolved of all responsibility for any evils committed. What I have said is that things must be viewed in perspective and context. Chomsky does not typically do this, because his goal is the demonization of the US rather than constructive criticism, and his crusade to demonize the US (and to demonize capitalism) would be greatly diminished in effectiveness were he to put things in their proper context and perspective.

[nothumb]

M,

You are usually far more reasonable and restrained than you have been in this thread. I for one like Chomsky's writing a lot, and I think the main reason some people hate him so much is that almost nobody - including people who 'love' him - bothers to read through all of his writing.

Chomsky is an expert on US society and politics. This is one reason for the focus on the US. Another reason is that the US has, for the last 50 years, been the foremost power in the world, particularly, as you are aware, for the last 15 or so. Hence its influence and its actions are of central importance as well. And, on top of this, the greatest myth in American politics is that of benign US intentions at home and abroad. Much like you are repulsed and aggravated by Chomsky's approach, I think it's fair to say that many people on the left are similarly repulsed by what they take to be an extreme double-standard. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all.

This is just my opinion, BTW, on why Chomsky has focused so much on flaws in the US. I don't personally believe he has an obligation to compare and contrast - he makes his agenda clear and never claims that other nations do not abuse. I don't really recall seeing him gloss over abuses in other countries but if there's an example you're thinking of you could post it. You seem to believe that, in a book about US foreign policy, he is obligated to seek out and call attention to similar flaws in other nations' actions. If someone wrote a book about abuses under Saddam, would you come forward calling for examples of brutality in American society as well?

NT

[theBruiser500]

I think the main reason some people hate him so much is that almost nobody - including people who 'love' him - bothers to read through all of his writing.

why is it important to read all of his writing?

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
Chomsky believes in the U.S. taking responsibility for those things the US has done wrong--plus, apparently, for those things any allies or clients of the US have done wrong.

[/ QUOTE ]
In other words, he applies the same standard to the U.S. that you apply to every country on the official list of "enemies."

Or do you think that states that have terrorists for clients or allies are not responsible for the terrorists' conduct?

[ QUOTE ]
I do not see him assigning much in the way of responsibility to America's enemies, though.

[/ QUOTE ]
Right, because this is stupid. As stupid as a lawyer defending an accused criminal by saying: "you might think my client is guilty because of all those people he murdered, but what you don't realize is that my client has enemies that have done even worse. Since this is obviously relevant to my client's conduct, you now have the 'context and perspective' you need to excuse his actions."

[ QUOTE ]
I have never said the US should be absolved of all responsibility for any evils committed. What I have said is that things must be viewed in perspective and context.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is just another way of saying that the U.S., unlike every other country in the world, always has a good excuse. Torture at Abu Grahib? Saddam was worse. Mass murder in Central America? More killed by Stalin and Mao. Millions killed in Vietnam. Ditto.

However, terrorism by Palestinians? Inexcusable, period. Korea and Iran building nukes? Inexcusable, period.

And so forth.

[nothumb]

Okay, I will re-phrase that with a cliche - for most people, the 'sample size is too small.' /images/graemlins/grin.gif

In other words, they read excerpted stuff, or they read the most controversial stuff that gets quoted, or they start reading an article or book to get a fair perspective and quit halfway through. Or they read a book and don't really absorb it and all that sticks with them is the parts that bothered them or they didn't understand.

Or, in general, people don't understand Chomsky, don't read even a reasonable amount of his work, or don't read it carefully. He is poorly understood and difficult to read.

BTW I do not make any presumptions/accusations on which, if any of these statements might apply to other 2+2 posters.

NT

[Zeno]

M,

I can't recall the title of the thread, sorry. I do remember some of it though. One of the few Political threads I got involved in. The main reason I wanted to say something in this thread was to help Bruiser500 keep a skeptical mindset. Which is always useful when reading about political issues that entail foreign or domestic policies that necessarily cover a wide range of ideas.

So instead of attacking Chomsky perhaps a better and fairer approach is to suggest to Bruiser and others a list of books that have a different perspective on America and its policies. Books that you think will help with a balanced worldview. There is a historian and writer called MacDonald that I saw on C-Span-2. He seemed a very knowledgeable and articulate fellow. Lives in Alabama I think. I may have made a post about him. Also Forgein Policy magazine is a good resource and Wislon Quarterly also. There are of course thousands more, whole forests are turned into pulp by all the churning out of books and magazines.

By the way, a better way to heap up scorn is through wit and sarcasm; the blunt approach usually backfires in a series debate. And I have learned, through my own mistakes, that some do take these discussions here very seriously.

I would prefer to read Bertrand Russell than anything by Chomsky. But Chomsky should be read nonetheless. After all, I also read the bible as all good atheists should.

-Zeno

[MMMMMM]

[ QUOTE ]
I do not see him assigning much in the way of responsibility to America's enemies, though.


Right, because this is stupid. As stupid as a lawyer defending an accused criminal by saying: "you might think my client is guilty because of all those people he murdered, but what you don't realize is that my client has enemies that have done even worse. Since this is obviously relevant to my client's conduct, you now have the 'context and perspective' you need to excuse his actions."

[/ QUOTE ]


There is an inherent and important difference that must be noted, based on two parameters.

First, is that in a competitive environment, comparisons are very appropriate. Since US interests were diametrically opposed to those of the USSR and China, and some "riding roughshod" by both parties unfortunately had to be expected to some degree in an imperfect world, it makes sense to keep the competitive nature of their relationship in mind.

In the worlds of mammoth competing interests and spy-vs-spy, standard rules of what is "criminal" do not necessarily apply in the same way as they do in a criminal trial. Indeed it would be impossible for gigantic powers to function--much less hold their own against their major adversaries--if they were completely bound by the constraints of decency and fairness and standard criminal law. I doubt if any major power has ever existed without breaking many of these precepts--especially when faced with serious opposing forcess which know no such restrictions.

If someone is going to fight you with no-holds-barred, it does not make sense to don boxing gloves and fight by Marquis of Queensbury rules. You would be at a significant disadvantage. Since the interests and political philosophies of these behemoths collided, it is unfair to accuse the US in isolation of dirty play without looking at things in the larger context. I'm not saying that should excuse every action by the US--but keeping things in perspective would make the US appear considerably less evil, anyway.

Second, behemoths cannot function in the world without some unavoidable, even unintentional, trampling of others. The elephant in the forest cannot avoid crushing some small creatures. This is an inherent function of size.

My principal objection to Chomsky is that he appears intent on demonizing the US and capitalism. Via selective reporting, he manages to do a very good job of this. It strikes me as not constructive criticism but rather as an intentionally destructive agenda. And given that he is pretty much a communist, one might easily guess why he is so intent on showing the US and capitalism in only a bad light, and in isolation. So...he is a research propagandist. If one researches things enough, one could probably also demonize any particular country, political system, or race.

If I looked on his selective reporting as constructive criticism, I would view him much differently, in a considerably softer light. But again, I think his purposes are destructive, and his real goal is to weaken the US and capitalism because his ultimate love and aim is communism. That all strikes me as deceitful, manipulative, twisted and sick. And he has been doing a very good job of convincing countless students that America is a very great evil, whereas actually, not only have greater evils existed, but America has also done an absolutely incredible amount of good as well. In fact the amount of good America has done should far outshine the bad, if weighed in the balance. But to listen to Chomsky, one would never know it, and would instead think America on a par with some great ravaging demon spawned in the nether reaches of hell.

[nothumb]

[ QUOTE ]
But again, I think his purposes are destructive, and his real goal is to weaken the US and capitalism because his ultimate love and aim is communism.

[/ QUOTE ]

Chomsky is not a Communist, or a statist. He is an anarchist. Again, this reiterates my point that I don't think you have read enough Chomsky to understand his true essence and his positive assertions. While one could classify his philosophy as 'socialist' in the sense that he seeks to better society through mutual aid and cooperative management of some resources, he is most certainly not a 'communist' in the sense of the word we are used to.

NT

[MMMMMM]

Well I agree Zeno, and generally do take the sort of approach you recommend, or at least a softer approach. So perhaps my overwhelming scorn for Chomsky's deliberate deceitfulness (through selective reporting) and ulterior motives is what causes me to refer to him as I do. If I use such language so rarely, it at least shows that I really mean it when I do use it. Further, and unfortunately, I really don't have time to compile a complete list of Chomsky articles for presentation.

So maybe I have done a disservice to Bruiser by using this approach on this rare occasion. I should think he will be smart enough to think for himself anyway, though I would advise him to look at, and reasearch, the larger historical picture in so doing. Anyway I will retain my right to call a pernicious, deceitful, agenda-driven mountebank a sick creep on rare occasion.

[MMMMMM]

Nothumb,


Chomsky is quite close to a communist IMO, and note that I originally wrote in this thread, "pretty much a communist".

This quote of Chomsky's is particularly chilling--and telling:

(excerpt) In 1967, he observed that, "if it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.[6]” (end excerpt)


What do you think of this (extensively footnoted) article?


"Noam Chomsky: Unrepentant Stalinist
By Anders G. Lewis
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 12, 2004

To the American Left in the 1960s, Hanoi was the Eternal City. It was the place to go to protest America’s war in Vietnam and to express one’s solidarity with Ho Chi Minh’s Communist regime. In Hanoi one could find, according to Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, a “socialism of the heart” and a budding “rice-roots democracy.” “We suspect,” they observed, “that colonial American town meetings and current Vietnamese village meetings, Asian peasants leagues and Black Belt sharecroppers’ unions have much in common….” It was also in Hanoi that one could, in Ramsey Clark’s words, witness “the chief and universal cause of the revolutionary impulse,” namely “the desire for equality.” “You see no internal conflict in this country,” Clark happily reported. At least, he stated, “I’ve seen none.” Finally, it was in Hanoi that one could, in Susan Sontag’s words, visit a place “which, in many respects, deserves to be idealized,” and see a people who “really do believe in the goodness of man….”[1]


Noam Chomsky was among those on the Left who traveled to Hanoi. In his At War With Asia (1970), the linguist-turned-activist fondly recounted how he found a country that was “unified, strong though poor, and determined to withstand the attack launched against [it] by the great superpower of the Western world.” Everywhere he went, Chomsky found people “healthy, well-fed, and adequately clothed.” Indeed, he saw great promise in Vietnamese Communism. “My personal guess is that, unhindered by imperialist intervention, the Vietnamese would develop a modern industrial society with much popular participation” and “direct democracy.” While in Hanoi, Chomsky broadcasted a speech of solidarity on behalf of the Communists. He declared that their heroism revealed “the capabilities of the human spirit and human will.” “Your cause,” he continued, “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.” Chomsky was so moved by his journey that, at one point, he proudly “sang songs, patriotic and sentimental, and declaimed poems” with his hosts. He admitted that some Western observers, those too encumbered by bourgeois prejudice, might find his actions distasteful. He was not concerned. “Let the reader think what he may,” Chomsky wrote. “The fact is,” the whole experience was “intensely moving.”[2]


Noam Chomsky went to Vietnam to protest a war he insisted was “simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men….”[3] He opposed the war in word and deed while it was being fought, and he continues to write against it today. In the 1960s, he aided antiwar students and participated in one of Boston’s first antiwar demonstrations. He also joined the infamous October 1967 march on the Pentagon. Chomsky thought it was a glorious affair with “tens of thousands of young people surrounding what they believed to be - I must add that I agree - the most hideous institution on this earth.” He helped form the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS), an organization that demanded “total, immediate, [and] unilateral American withdrawal” from Vietnam. And in 1969, Chomsky supported the October 15 nationwide Moratorium Against the War in Vietnam.[4]


Chomsky has always been celebrated by the Left for his relentless opposition to the war. In 1969, Robert Sklar wrote a review of Chomsky’s work for The Nation and glowed about his “remarkable scholarly tenacity and depth” and his “capacity for going beneath specific political issues to unveil their underlying cultural and ideological foundations….” A few years later, Simon Head argued that Chomsky’s work on the war was “of great value in making sense of the present.” More recently, radical historian Howard Zinn has called Chomsky “the leading critic of America’s involvement in Vietnam.” Noted anti-free trade activist Arundhati Roy, in a new forward to Chomsky’s For Reasons of State (1972), praises him as “one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time.” Finally, in 2003, Richard Falk argued that Chomsky was right about the Vietnam War. His judgments, Folk proposed, “stand brilliantly the test of time.”[5]


Chomsky’s indictment of the war has not changed since the 1960s. To understand it, one could read an essay he published in 1968, or one published in 2003. For almost forty years, he has offered the same critique. It rests on four related points. First, Chomsky argues that Communism offered the Vietnamese people the opportunity for a democratic and prosperous future. Second, he argues that the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), was not assisted by the Chinese or the Soviets. Similarly, he argues that the independent National Liberation Front (NLF or Vietcong), was a South Vietnamese political organization that was not controlled by the DRV. Third, Chomsky provides a Marxist interpretation of the war’s origins. The U.S., be believes, went to Vietnam for economic reasons. Further, the corporate ruling class determined American foreign policy in Vietnam, and their major goal was boosting the power and profits of big business. Fourth, Chomsky argues that the U.S. resorted to Nazi-like acts of barbarity and repression to accomplish its goals, including the installment of a lackey government in South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam or RVN).


Chomsky’s four point critique is extensive. He offers an epic and gripping story of American greed, ignorance, and cruelty contrasted with the grit and solidarity of the Vietnamese Communists. He views America as an evil colossus, an omnipotent and always unjust force inflicting its will on the innocent Vietnamese. The story of America in Vietnam is not, as some liberals might think, a story of a once noble effort that metamorphosized into a quagmire. Instead, it is the story of America’s willful and intentional criminality – of its attempt to inflict genocide on the people of Southeast Asia. Chomsky’s work makes for gripping and, if one did not know any better, disturbing reading. But alas, Chomsky’s Vietnam epic is entirely wrong.


Chomsky’s first point is his contention that Communism offered Vietnam the opportunity for a golden future. He argues that Ho Chi Minh and his comrades were fighting to bring about a new world of economic justice and national emancipation. Their goal was to establish a “good example” of non-capitalist development for other Third World nations to follow. The society they desired was one that would, as Chomsky stated while on his tour of Vietnam, enable free and creative men to control their own destiny. Chomsky also insists that the Vietnamese people overwhelmingly supported the Communists.


Much of Chomsky’s first point rests on his analysis of the DRV’s 1953-1956 land reform campaign, and on his dismissal of Communist atrocities. He believes that the land reform campaign, in which the Communists took land away from farmers and landlords and gave it to poor peasants, was an important and necessary achievement. For too long, Chomsky argues, Vietnamese peasants had suffered from gross economic inequalities. True, Chomsky concedes, some of the tactics used to implement the reforms were too aggressive, but the overall effect of the campaign was positive.


Chomsky propagated this view of the DRV’s land reform campaign during the war and he has clung to it ever since. In 1967, he observed that, “if it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.”[6] In 1970, he admitted that some people were killed during the campaign but insisted that this was less important than the fact that land reform “laid the basis for a new society” that has “overcome starvation and rural misery and offers the peasants hope for the future.”[7] After the war, in a book that Chomsky co-wrote with Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (1979), he argued again that the reforms were much needed. He also insisted that they were not intended as political reprisal against opponents. Moreover, Communist leaders did not condone the violence associated with the reforms: “There is no evidence that the leadership ordered or organized mass executions of peasants.”[8] Further, they were “upset by the abuses,” and demonstrated a capacity to “keep in touch with rural interest and needs.” Most importantly, the land reform was an economic success.[9]



Because Chomsky viewed Vietnamese Communism as a viable alternative to capitalist development, he dismissed the violence associated with land reform as inconsequential. He dismissed, as well, numerous other Communist atrocities such as the 1968 massacre at Hue where Communists killed three thousand civilians. The Hue massacre, he argued, should be attributed to the U.S.[10]

Chomsky’s first point is wrong. His romantic faith that Communism could work in Vietnam is contradicted by the fact that Communism simply can not work in any nation. It is an inherently flawed economic doctrine that inevitably leads to totalitarianism. F.A. Hayek, the great economic theorist, pointed this out long before the onset of the Vietnam War. In his Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek cogently argued that because modern economies are too complex to be managed by even the brightest of state bureaucrats, centralized economic planning and control will destroy economic productivity. It will also give the state monopolistic control over the most basic decisions of life. In so doing, Communism will furnish the state control of the means for all human ends, and “whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower – in short, what men should strive for.”[11] Communism, Hayek argued, would never work and the human costs involved in trying to make it work would be terribly high.

Cold War developments proved Hayek correct. In Eastern Europe, North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union, Communism was a colossal nightmare. According to the authors of The Black Book of Communism (1999), Communism was responsible for the deaths of possibly 100 million people during the course of the 20th century. Communism killed. It also ruined economies. In the Soviet Union, for example, Communism produced poverty, food shortages, denial of basic services, massive pollution, low rates of productivity, terrible health conditions, corruption, lack of educational opportunities, and high rates of alcoholism. In the 20th century, as David Horowitz has argued, history demonstrated Communism’s “utter bankruptcy and historic defeat.”[12]



Vietnamese Communism was no exception. Contrary’s to Chomsky’s thesis, the Vietnamese Communists were not progressive, popular, or capable of building a prosperous society. Instead, they were despotic. Their economic policies, in turn, were disastrous. These facts are clearly demonstrated by the Communist’s political actions and economic program before, during, and after the Vietnam War.

In 1945, immediately after establishing the DRV, the Communists dedicated themselves to the elimination of all opposition. They strove to replicate the horrors of Soviet and Chinese Communism. In a 1951 speech, Ho Chi Minh (who had studied and lived in the Soviet Union) proudly declared that “Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Stalin are the common teachers for the world revolution.” He also expressed great confidence in the future because “We have the most clear-sighted and worthy elder brothers and friends of mankind – comrade Stalin and comrade Mao Tse-tung.”[13] Following his elder brothers, Ho established a one-party state with a secret police force and numerous detention camps for dissidents. He strove to liquidate Trotskyites, political dissidents, and even women who had married Frenchmen. “All those who do not follow the line which I lay down,” he threatened, “will be broken.”[14]

The DRV’s land reform campaign was particularly vicious. Contrary to Chomsky, it did involve mass killings. Its purpose was to destroy wealthy and middling landowners by stealing their property and giving it to poor peasants. The result was large scale terror, paranoia, perhaps 100,000 dead, and many thousands more who were imprisoned. Moreover, top Party leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, instigated and directed the campaign. As William Duiker has pointed out in his Ho Chi Minh (2000), “there is ample evidence that much of the [violence associated with land reform] was deliberately inspired by Party leaders responsible for drafting and carrying out the program.”[15] Economically, it was a disaster. By following the model provided by China and killing thousands of productive and successful land holders, many of whom owned comparatively small plots of land, the Communists were insuring the demise of their economic policies. The DRV’s land reform campaign was a monstrous act that paralleled similar efforts in the Soviet Union and China. As Michael Lind has written in his Vietnam: The Necessary War (1999), “Communist agriculture could not produce good harvests – but it repeatedly produced bumper crops of the dead.”[16]

After carrying out their brutal policies in the North, the Communists sought to extend their power to South Vietnam. In 1957, they launched a terrorist campaign against supporters of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. Over the next several years, Vietcong guerillas assassinated tens of thousands of individuals and abducted thousands more. They also killed many thousands of innocent civilians by shelling towns and cities with rockets and mortars.[17]

The South Vietnamese, moreover, were not devoted to the Vietcong, as was clearly demonstrated during the 1968 Tet offensive when they refused to rally to the Communist cause – as the Communists believed they would. Nor, for that matter, were the North Vietnamese as supportive of the Communists as Chomsky argues. After the 1954 Geneva conference, there was a mass exodus of North Vietnamese into South Vietnam, including as many as one million Catholics. In fact, in the immediate months after the conference, almost ten times as many Vietnamese headed South as did those who went North.[18] During the war, millions of Vietnamese realized that the Communists were destroying their chances for democracy and economic development. The war’s aftermath confirmed their suspicions and demonstrated what the true aims of the Communists were. It also proved the complete fallacy of Chomsky’s first point.

In 1975, after taking Saigon, the Communists quickly extended their Stalinist dictatorship throughout South Vietnam.[19] The new Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) was corrupt and tyrannical. Its Stalinist leaders trampled on individual rights and established a string of “reeducation camps” for anyone not sufficiently supportive of the new regime. They forced possibly one million or more people into these cruel and primitive camps for weeks, months, or years, and without any legal trials. Camp prisoners suffered from severe malnutrition, as well as malaria, and dysentery. One journalist who interviewed former inmates noted that prisoners commonly suffered “from limb paralysis, vision loss, and infectious skin diseases like scabies caused by long-term, closely-packed, dark living conditions.” Because of these inhumane conditions, many prisoners killed themselves.[20] The Communists also eliminated freedom of movement, requiring all citizens to carry internal passports. They eliminated all political parties and conducted bogus political elections. They closed down the free press that had existed in South Vietnam and created two official papers and one official television channel. They launched a racist pogrom against Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese citizens.[21] They swept aside all southerners, including almost all NLF leaders, from positions of power. They also subjected all citizens to daily education sessions to promote the Party’s power and to celebrate the words of Ho Chi Minh and other great Communist luminaries, including Stalin.[22] One official poem, written by the head of the Communist Party Committee of Culture, contained these moving lines:

Oh, Stalin! Oh, Stalin!

The love I bear my father, my mother, my wife, myself

It’s nothing beside the love I bear you.

Oh, Stalin! Oh, Stalin!

What remains of the earth and of the sky!

Now that you are dead.[23]


All of this was deeply discouraging to the people of Vietnam. One former Communist official, General Pham Xuan An, commented “All that talk about ‘liberation’ twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished, broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists.”[24]

Under Communist rule, Vietnam became a totalitarian hell and an economic calamity. The workers paradise that Chomsky envisioned never came. Provided their opportunity to be free of American “imperialism,” the Vietnamese Communists – following the examples provided by China and the Soviet Union – used the economy to enrich themselves at the expense of the people they had professed to care so much for. They proved once again that Communism simply does not work. Since 1975, corruption has been rife, as has unemployment and poverty. Vietnam’s per capita income and its GDP have remained extremely low. The peasantry has felt little incentive to work hard and is generally embittered. In 1988, parts of Vietnam suffered famine, with millions of people on the brink of death. Vietnam’s educational system remains poor, as does its basic infrastructure. Prostitution, crime, and drug use plague the country.[25] One can go on and on but the point should be clear. Contrary to what Chomsky predicted, Vietnamese Communism has proven to be a total disaster.


The consequence of Communist rule was a mass exodus of as many as two million Vietnamese who fled Vietnam in small boats and rafts in the hopes of finding a better life in Indonesia, the Philippines, or the United States. Eventually, approximately one million Vietnamese came to the U.S., the nation that Chomsky believes is the enemy of the Vietnamese people. “There is no way out, no hope,” one individual declared, “….The best way to commit suicide is to take a boat. Either you go to the bottom of the ocean or to paradise – California.”[26]


Chomsky’s response to the grim fate that has befallen Vietnam has been to rally to the SRV’s defense and to blame everything on the U.S. In 1975 he celebrated Saigon’s collapse.[27] In 1977 he declared that he would not sign any letter that would be distributed through the American media that protested human rights violations in Vietnam. In fact, he disputed claims that any significant violations were taking place and he reminded people of the “unprecedented savagery” of America’s attack against Vietnam. He did acknowledge the existence of the reeducation camps, but insisted that some of the individuals in them deserved their fate. He also attacked the credibility of refugee reports, while happily using the reports of visitors to Vietnam who shared his politics. In later years, Chomsky simply argued that any problem that was occurring in Vietnam was the fault of the United States. The U.S. war, he insisted, guaranteed that the Communists would establish a Stalinist state. “Imposing harsh conditions on an impoverished Third World society,” he claimed, “….more or less compel[s] them to resort to draconian measures.”[28] Moreover, the SRV’s reeducation camps were the best that could be expected, and the level of political repression was typical for a nation recovering after a war.[29]


Chomsky wants to absolve the Communists of their sins. This will not do. It was the Communists, not the U.S., that established a Stalinist state. They built the reeducation camps. They built the cult of personality around Ho Chi Minh, Stalin, and Mao. They killed, tortured, and imprisoned their political opponents. And they have destroyed, for some time to come, the hope that Vietnam could become a prosperous, productive, and democratic nation. To insist, as Chomsky does, that the U.S. is to blame for this tragic reality is to resort to Alice in Wonderland logic. It is to deny that the Communists were Communists, individuals who were doing nothing more than following the dictates of their own twisted ideology. These are facts, though for many on the Left such as Chomsky, they are embarrassing to acknowledge. As Doan Van Toai, a former Vietnamese revolutionary, has argued, intellectuals such as Chomsky have chosen to ignore or rationalize Vietnam’s ugly fate. Astutely, Toai observes that such intellectuals will likely “continue to maintain their silence in order to avoid the profound disillusionment that accepting the truth about Vietnam means for them.”[30]


Chomsky’s second point is his assertion that the DRV was independent of Soviet and Chinese aid and that the NLF was independent of Hanoi. Chomsky first advanced this point during the war. In 1972, he argued that “Administration spokesmen have held to the view that by destroying Vietnam we are somehow standing firm against Chinese or Russian aggression….One searches the record in vain for evidence of this policy.”[31] After the war, Chomsky reiterated this view. In What Uncle Sam Really Wants (1992), he argued that U.S. leaders simply invented the idea of a great North Vietnamese-Chinese-Soviet axis to scare Americans into supporting the war. Communism was not some ominous collection of powerful nations arrayed against the U.S. Instead, it was the idea that government should take care of its people, not the needs of an imperial power. This was not an acceptable idea to American imperialists. In Rethinking Camelot (1993), Chomsky wrote that “it was Ho Chi Minh’s ‘ultranationalism’ that made him unacceptable, not his services to the ‘Kremlin conspiracy’ or ‘Soviet expansion’….”[32] The war, he contends, was an act of aggression against an independent nation that was unaided by the two great Communist superpowers. It was also an act of aggression against the NLF, a popular and nationalistic South Vietnamese organization that advocated popular economic and social programs. NLF authority, Chomsky writes approvingly, was “decentralized and placed in the hands of local people, in contrast to the rule of the U.S. client regime, perceived as ‘outside forces’ by major segments of the local population.” NLF policies, particularly its land reforms, benefited the great mass of poor peasants. Moreover, Northerners did not influence the NLF, and did not become directly involved in the struggle against the United States until after 1965. The war, according to Chomsky, must be characterized as an “invasion” by the U.S. into a nation that simply refused to kowtow to American imperialism.[33]


Chomsky’s second point can not be sustained. Scholars who have had access to Vietnamese, Soviet, and Chinese sources have now firmly established that both the Soviet Union and China provided the DRV with substantial military and economic assistance during the war. They have also established that Hanoi controlled the NLF.[34]


Chinese aid to the Communists was essential in the 1950s and the 1960s. At the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Chinese advisers directed the Communist dominated Viet Minh army. China also furnished the Viet Minh with food, trucks, oil, canons, guns, artillery shells, and millions of bullets. Chinese aid enabled the Viet Minh’s victory over the French.[35] From 1953 to 1956, China played a key role in assisting the North Vietnamese land reform campaign. Chinese Communists trained many of the campaign’s leaders. The DRV official who directed the program, General Secretary Truong Chinh, was a well known supporter of Mao and the Marxist idea of class war. The killing of class enemies, Chinh believed, was a necessary component of the Vietnamese Revolution.[36] Finally, from 1965 to 1968 - as Qiang Zhai has pointed out in his recent, China and the Vietnam Wars (2000) - Mao sent 320,000 support troops to North Vietnam. China also supplied surface-to-air missiles, artillery, and essential logistical assistance.[37] The Chinese and the Vietnamese Communists celebrated their joint efforts and appreciated the bloody results. In one remarkable conversation that Mao had with North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong, and military leader Le Duc Anh, the Great Helmsman took particular pleasure in learning what effect Chinese anti-tank weapons had on American soldiers:

Pham Van Dong: Tanks will melt when they are hit by this weapon.

Le Duc Anh: And the drivers will be burnt to death.

Mao Zedong: Good. Can we produce more of this?[38]


One no longer needs to search in vain for evidence of Chinese support for the Vietnamese Revolution. Nor does one have to search in vain to find enough evidence to realize that Soviet assistance was also of fundamental importance to the DRV. According to the Oxford University Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (1998), total Soviet bloc aid from 1955 to 1961 was over $1 billon. The Soviets supplied loans to build dozens of industrial plants and numerous power stations. By 1971, the Soviet Union had provided up to $3 billion in economic and military aid to North Vietnam.[39] Soviet military assistance included T-54 tanks, SA-7 Strela anti-aircraft missiles, and thousands of SA-2 surface-to air–missiles. Soviet aid, moreover, continued long after the war was over. In 1983, the Soviets were supplying the Vietnamese up to $4 million a day in economic and military aid.[40]


ENDNOTES:

[1] The reference to Hanoi as the Eternal City is taken from Roger Kimball. See Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), pp.127-144. Hayden and Lynd are quoted in John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp.240-241, and in Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p.266. Clark is quoted in Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: The Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 271. Sontag is quoted in Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were In Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp.90-91.

[2] Noam Chomsky, At War With Asia (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp.259-287. The speech Chomsky gave in Hanoi can be found on Frontpage magazine at: http://frontpagemag.com. In personal correspondence with me, Chomsky stated he “can’t either confirm or deny” that he gave it. The speech is, however, entirely consistent with what he wrote in At War With Asia, and with his general stance towards the war. Chomksy also sought to deny what he wrote. When I confronted him with the fact that he “sang songs, patriotic and sentimental, and declaimed poems,” with the Communists, he wrote back: “I’ll be interested to see where I produced the ‘words’ that you have just invented and attributed to me….I realize that you feel it is your right to fabricate arbitrary slanders, but don’t you think that this is going a little too far?” It was a stunning response. Chomsky’s efforts, as well as the efforts of all the other activists who traveled to Hanoi, were warmly welcomed by the North Vietnamese. “Visits to Hanoi…” by American antiwar activists, one North Vietnamese Communist has commented, “gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.” Quoted in Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Anchor, 2001), p.416.

[3] Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: New Press, 2002), p.9.

[4] On Chomsky’s antiwar activities see Milan Rai, Chomsky’s Politics (London: Verso, 1995); Keith Windschuttle, “The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky,” NewCriterion.com, May 2, 2003; The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, The Indochina Story (New York: Bantam, 1970); Harry Summers Jr., The Vietnam War Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), pp.118-119.

[5] Robert Sklar, “The Intellectual Power Elite,” The Nation, March 24, 1969. Simon Head, “Story Without End,” The New York Review of Books, August 9, 1973. See Roy’s foreword in the new edition of Chomsky’s For Reason of State (New York: The New Press, 2003), pp.vii-xx. Roy adds a few exciting twists to the Left’s attack against the war by blasting the U.S. for all the “dead birds, the charred animals, the murdered fish,” and yes, the “incinerated insects.” See Roy’s foreword in the new edition of Chomsky’s For Reason of State (New York: The New Press, 2003), pp.vii-xx. Zinn’s comments are contained in the New Press edition of American Power and the New Mandarins, cited above, pp.iii-ix. Falk’s comments were posted to the H-DIPLO website on July 23, 2003. See: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo.

[6] Quoted in Windschuttle, “The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky.”

[7] Chomsky, At War With Asia, pp.280-281.

[8] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p.432.

[9] Ibid, pp.342-345.

[10] Chomsky, For Reasons of State, pp.230-232.

[11] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p.101.

[12] David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future (New York: The Free Press, 1998), p.96. Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black of Communism: Crimes, Terror, and Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.4. Also see Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2001). Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

[13] Quoted in Bernard Fall, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920-1966 (New York: Signet Books, 1967), pp.188-208.

[14] Courtois, et al, The Black of Communism, pp.565-575. Ho Chi Minh is quoted in Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War (New York: Touchstone, 1999), p.241.

[15] William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p.475. Also see Courtois, et al, The Black of Communism, p.569.

[16] Courtois, et al, The Black of Communism, pp.569-570. Also see Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War, p.151-156. Also see Spencer Tucker ed., The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.447-448.

[17] Tucker, ed, The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, p.448. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp.272-274.

[18] See Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War, p.149.

[19] The Communist victory in Vietnam and the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia promoted the fall of Laos to the Communist Pathet Lao, and the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal massacre in Cambodia. The dominoes, as American leaders predicted, did fall. The Communist victory in Vietnam also encouraged Soviet proxies in Ethiopia, Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

[20] See Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, p.348. Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff, The Vietnamese Gulag (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). For an informative report on Vietnam written three years after the war see Carl Gershman, “After the Dominoes Fell,” Commentary, May, 1978.

[21] See Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded America: Political Culture and the Causes of War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), chapter 7.

[22] See Robert Templer, Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

[23] Quoted in Podhoretz, Why We Were In Vietnam, p.202

[24] Quoted in Hanson, Carnage and Culture, p.427.

[25] Templer, Shadows and Wind.

[26] Quoted in Henry Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996), p.238. George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1996), p.302.

[27] At what Howard Zinn has called the war’s last teach-in, Zinn, Chomsky, and the participants were joyous upon hearing of the fall of Saigon. “In the midst of the proceedings,” Zinn recalls, “a student came racing down the aisle with a dispatch in his hand, shouting ‘Saigon has fallen. The war is over,’ and the auditorium exploded in cheers.” See Zinn’s forward in Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, p.viii.

[28] C.P. Otero ed., Chomsky: Language and Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1988), p.560. In 1977, Chomsky stated that he would sign “an appropriately worded protest” of human rights violations if it would be released through a country such as Sweden. He refused to sign any protest through the American mass media because it “supported the war through its worst atrocities.” See C.P. Otero, ed. Noam Chomsky: Radical Priorities (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1981), pp.62-80. These statements nicely reflect Chomsky’s efforts to avoid moral responsibility for his positions. He was quite happy to use the media to attack the war in Vietnam, but he will not use it to call attention to the SRV’s human rights violations. Further, I have found no evidence that he has ever published any indictment of the SRV, either in the American or the Swedish media. To this day, he simply refuses to part ways with his Vietnamese comrades. When I asked him, in personal correspondence, to cite one book or article he had written that denounces the SRV, he responded: “Your…question is quite comical. I’ll be glad to answer as soon as you send me the books in which you have condemned the murderous atrocities for which you share responsibility….And if you really cannot comprehend why this is the right answer, I’m afraid you are placing yourself well beyond the bounds of possible discussion.”

[29] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology. The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp.61-118. Chomsky argues that the U.S. actually won the war because it accomplished its goal of destroying Vietnam’s chance to provide a “good example” of Third World economic development.

[30] Doan Van Toai, “A Lament for Vietnam,” The New York Times, March 19, 1981.

[31] Chomsky, “Vietnam: How Government Became Wolves,” The New York Review of Books, June 15, 1972.

[32] Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Tucson: Odonian Press, 1992), p.10. Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (Boston: South End Press, 1993), p.22.

[33] Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot, pp.56-63 and pp.90-93. Also see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp.188-190.

[34] See the introduction and chapter 2 in Marc Jason Gilbert ed., Why The North Won the Vietnam War (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Gilbert writes that “it was Chinese and Soviet military aid that helped North Vietnam survive American escalation and eventually win the war.” George Herring, in turn, writes that Soviet and Chinese aid “played a crucial role in Hanoi’s ability to resist U.S. military pressures.”

[35] John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.161-163. Also see Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded America, p.125.

[36] Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, p.477.

[37] Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p.135. Also see Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

[38] Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tonnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung, and James G. Hershberg, “77 Conversations between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964-1977,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper No.22 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, May 1998).

[39] Tucker ed., The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, pp.448-449.

[40] Summers, The Vietnam War Almanac, p.316. Also see Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996). "

[jokerswild]

Please read some history books before you spought doctrine.
I know that it would involve more than reading the Drudge Report and listening to Limbaugh, but you could actually do it.

[Zeno]

[ QUOTE ]
He is an anarchist.

[/ QUOTE ]


Form the OED:

Anarchist, An advocate of anarchy; a person who believes that all government should be abolished.


Anarchy 1. Absence of government in a society (orig. as a source of disorder, later also as a political ideal); a state of political or social confusion; absolute freedom of the individual.

2. Absence or non-recognition of authority in any sphere; moral or intellectual conflict, a state of disorder, chaos.

This is also added: anarcho-syndicalist (a supporter of) a movement aiming at the transfer of the means of industrial production to unions of workers.

__________________________________________________ ___

When you call Chomsky an 'anarchist', I assume you are blending only some of the above definitions and concepts.

Chomsky is in reality, at least in my opinion, a slave. A slave to his own ideology, a slave to his own mindset, a slave to attention, a slave to his own importance. He has slavishly destroyed his own mind.

-Zeno

[nothumb]

Hi Zeno,

As an anarchist, here is my definition of the roots and fundamental tenets of anarchism.

A philosophy of reason demands that we recognize as fundamental to the value of human beings two things: first, free will and its exercise, and second, the capacity for rational thought and analysis. It is the combination of these two things - free will supported by rational inquiry and introspection - that could be said to make a person 'autonomous' or in posession of responsibility for himself. Hence we do not view children and the insane as autonomous or self-reliant, because they lack one of these two elements. Most people view these people as having some degree of autonomy, but not posessing it in the full sense of the word.

To put it in simple language, I think each man, to be true to himself and his nature, is obliged to meet the description of 'autonomy' wherever possible. For a thinking man this is possible to a very great degree.

It is rather simple to demonstrate how any form of government heretofore existing on Earth in some way undermines this basic autonomy. Even representative democracies have obvious logical and practical flaws that make them at times extremely inhospitable to truly independent, thinking people. Democracy was, after all, initially a pejorative term meaning, "The rule of the mob."

As such, no anarchist accepts the a priori legitimacy of any government or any law, unless that law is formed and upheld by a truly direct, democratic process in which the person is a willing participant. This does not mean that I disobey the law at every turn, or hold contempt for the majority of laws on the books. It simply means that I choose to obey the law because it suits my sense of right and wrong, or because breaking it would cost me to such an extent that it is preferable not to. I do not obey the law because it is the law.

Anarchism as a coherent philosophy is not a wanton disregard for all forms of order or organization. It is merely a rejection of the age-old claim of lords, kings, elites, or any other ruling class to the right to rule. It is the affirmation of each person's ability - and obligation - to think and act for himself.

FWIW I think abolishing all government at this stage of history would be catastrophic. My modest aim is to sow the seeds of anarchism in those who are willing to think for themselves and truly own and author their actions. Anarchism, like any other political philosophy, is practiced in degrees, and each small degree, practiced correctly, is a step in the right direction.

With this in mind I have trouble seeing how an anarchist is a slave to himself; to me, understanding this basic argument has made me far more free than I was before.

NT

BTW, I am working on a response to M's latest post, but will need to go over some stuff rather carefully before doing so. This should serve in the interim.

[Zeno]

I enjoyed your post.

I think the use of the word anarchist for your 'extreme individualistic philosophy' is a poor word choice. Make up a new word, use some Greek or Latin root for free individual, or truly free or whatever and conjure up something with a more positive emotive effect. Its all about the Spin baby. /images/graemlins/smirk.gif

Your anarchism sounds like a blend of different concepts – libertarianism, free thought movements, Athenian direct democracy (which so irked Plato) etc.

I'm off to the book store. Later.

-Zeno

[nothumb]

Hi Z,

I toyed with the idea of calling myself an 'isonomist' for a while, drawing from the Greek word for a system of 'no-rule.' This was the ideal of Athenian direct-democracy, with democracy being the pejorative term arising when this system became a mob rule.

I don't think of myself as extremely individualistic, however, despite the fact that the ultimate source of value in humans for me comes from each individual. Humans are social creatures and I believe strongly in the power of society. It's just that society as an idea which supercedes the individual is a big no-no for me.

EDIT: The reason I didn't change the label is that just because so many people misunderstand the idea of anarchism doesn't mean I have to stop believing in it. There are a ton of words - liberal, for instance - that are thrown around with little regard for their actual meaning. Resigning yourself to this is resigning yourself to the dilution and debasement of all public discourse (which, I suppose, a lot of people have done /images/graemlins/frown.gif ).

NT

[riverflush]

nothumb...

Quick hit question: Why do so many anarchists (at least the one's I've had the priviledge to be around) have an aversion to capitalism? To me, being hostile to economic freedom runs contrary to the very essence of anarchism...

Is it the concept of labor as a commodity that causes these anarchists to part ways with the pure concept?

I would estimate that my exposure to anarchism has been 85% through anarcho-socialists. It's always struck me as a fundamentally paradoxical philosophy. Because humans will always act according to their rational self-interest, and since that interest usually includes working to support one's desired lifestyle...individuals will always contract to trade their labor for the power to buy goods. People will usually take the "trade" that is best available to them at a given time, even if that "trade" of labor for goods is uneven, simply to survive. (Example: a college grad working a shitty job just to make ends meet until he can acquire his desired career)

The fundamental paradox within the philosophy comes when you realize that the only way to stop people from making unbalanced labor trades is to use organized force, otherwise known as govenment. If true anarcho-socialists are to realize their ideal society ("fair" wage/labor relationships), it will only come through some form of group oppression of business owners. So called, "direct action" rarely works in real situations...simply because in the long run people will act selfishly, because they truly only care about food on their table.


I ask this question in good faith.

This runs deep through the heart of my own philosophy, which could probably be described as Minarchism , not Anarchism. Unfortunately, simply because I believe Minarchism is more practical in real-life terms...some are quick to label me as "right-wing." That's ok...as I've accepted it and even relish the label because in these days it's just not cool to be on the "right"...and I've always gone against the grain.

What might be "right" today was "left" in the days of Friedrich Hayek.

[nothumb]

Hi flush,

To put this back on track a bit, I'll quote Chomsky. In an interview, someone asked him what he thought about so-called 'anarcho-capitalism,' and whether it was possible. "I think that they [Libertarians] are not understanding the fundamental doctrine [of anarchism], that you should be free from domination and control, including the control of the manager and the owner." In other words, he thinks that capitalism by its very nature breeds involuntary, coercive relationships of the same variety as serfdom, communism or slave societies.

It seems that from your description of the urge towards commodifying one's own labor that you would agree that this tends to happen in modern society. However I differ from you in saying that I do not believe man necessarily, instinctively enters into exploitative labor 'sales' - there have been many societies where labor was provided under other coercive measures, such as feudalism or slave societies. I think we can agree that these are worse than the more or less forced sale of labor, but they do not represent the use of labor as a commodity. That is a strictly modern phenomenon.

I also disagree with your idea that the only way to prevent these uneven exchanges of labor for goods is through government. I would argue that, in many cases, government acts to preserve these relationships, not prevent them, by enforcing corporate codes and the capitalist system. If government did not prevent you from taking action to the contrary, would you accept minimum wage at Wal-Mart? Would you work in an economy where your labor was systematically undervalued if you understood this was happening? I wouldn't. I happen to have found a niche where I make a decent enough living and can live with what I do; in that I consider myself lucky.

One of the four great errors of history is confusing cause and consequence. People think that government is the only way to prevent abuses in capitalism, or that the state is in fact in the business of interfering with pure capitalism. I believe quite the opposite; capitalism would not (and does not) survive without a strong, centralized state.

This is really the tip of an iceberg so I'll leave it there for now.

NT

[riverflush]

nothumb...

You and I are so far off in socioeconomic philosophy (I believe capitalism is making centralized states obsolete; and you believe that centralized states are essential to capitalism) - and yet it's refreshing to me that we're able to have a discussion on the subject.

I see capitalism as a liberating force, you see it as inherently oppressive. 180 degrees off. But just as I often read texts on Marxism, et. al. - I'm always willing to listen to a reasoned argument.

Thanks for the reply.

[riverflush]

And two more things...

1) I do not see manager/worker relationships as involuntary; but rather completely voluntary. As an experienced manager myself (own or owned 4 businesses, from concrete install to publishing) - I know from much experience that I only get out of my employees what I pay for. The only way for my business to have many happy customers is to make sure that I have many happy employees...which comes from both treating them with respect, and paying them top $$$. It's really just that simple. The Wal-Mart example is a bad one, IMO, because I personally believe Wal-Mart is headed for an eventual collapse due to unhappy workers, poor store conditions, and an overall bad public image. Despite the apparent monstrosity of Wal-Mart, they are not immune to capitalism's natural tendency to correct itself by weeding out shoddy products and services. How many people do you know that make an effort to shop at Target instead of Wal-Mart because it's cleaner, has a better layout, and it's employees are happier? I know of many - including myself. The $.05 savings on my deodorant isn't worth the hassle. This, IMO, will eventually bite Wally World in the ass.

I could also go on a whole other tangent here and talk about how having a top-down structure of manager/supervisor/worker is much more efficient than having, for lack of a better term, too many cooks in the kitchen ....but then I'd really be taking this thread down a very different path.

and...

2) The "I'm rich, biatch!!!!" in your profile...excellent. When I first saw that Chappelle's Show clip (reparations) I just about spit out my drink from laughing so hard.

[Boopotts]

Quick-- someone go alert Gibbon that he's been relegated to the dust heap of pop historians, simply because he didn't go Nostradomus in the eighth volume of 'Fall...'

[riverflush]

Just found this book:

The Anti-Chomsky Reader (http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/anch/anch.html)

Apparently Horowitz, Radosh, and others have put their thoughts about Chomsky into a volume...consolodating their previous articles, etc.

[Chris Alger]

You started by castigating US critics for failing to contrast US perfidy with that of others, on the assumption that all bad acts by the US were logically connected to greater evils to the point of preventing them. Now you've expanded this assumption to include a "spy-vs-spy" fantasy of Soviet aggression everywhere, justifying everything. Again, it's all assumed, and amounts to your internalization of official rhetoric to such an extreme degree that challenging it amounts to a kind of terrible heresy.

Few dispute that when combatting great evil, terrible things can be justified. Some obviously don't buy this, but they recognize the argument. It's not the point.

The point is that you simply assume the alternatives to US actions are always worse: everything we do amounts to fighting bad guys. Your Soviet counterpart could just as easily (and did) invoke the horrors of fascism to justify everything the Soviet Union did. But without solid evidence no one would take it seriously.

With other countries, we ridicule quasi-religious apologists who insist that "good intentions" and "self-defense" be deemed self-evident. With the US, any departure from this assumption amounts, in the eyes of the state-worshipping right, as intolerable anti-American bias. Your posts here could hardly reflect this mentality more perfectly. Chomsky deserves venomous castigation ("deceitful, manipulative, twisted and sick") for failing to both assume and concede the existence of some greater evil prevented or at least targeted by all US conduct.

As for your criticism of Chomsky's evidence, all you're doing is denouncing him for failing to do the same thing you fail to do: provide facts that justify bad US conduct. In fact, Chomsky has devoted tens of thousands of pages to citing and analyzing the rhetoric and reality of official justifications. You assume such justifications exist, and that they're almost always valid, and that the job of those who challenge your assumption is actually to prove it for you.

What seems to be driving your attitude is similar to the transparent motives behind much US apologist propaganda. It isn't that US excuses are valid or even plausible, but that in the absence of some excuse "others" might entertain evil thoughts and therefore come to menace Americans. In short, you'd have a tough time convincing all but the simplist minds that you believe in half of what you say. I'ts more of a compulsion to fill the void, plug the dike, with anything handy, lest we give moral support to the barbarians. It's the ubiquitous pandering to those that can't rise above their fear and hatred of the "other," one reason is so often crops up in the tabloids.

I'd advise working harder at gathering the evidence of justification instead of wasting it reading mirrors for your assumptions.

[Chris Alger]

Are you suggesting that if "the consequences of not using terror would be that" all Americans would be forced to "live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines," that terror would not be justified? What if the only alternative were that every American would be wiped out or come under foreign tyranny -- would terror be justified then?

[MMMMMM]

"You started by castigating US critics for failing to contrast US perfidy with that of others, on the assumption that all bad acts by the US were logically connected to greater evils to the point of preventing them."

No. My assumption is that some of those acts were so connected.


" Now you've expanded this assumption to include a "spy-vs-spy" fantasy of Soviet aggression everywhere, justifying everything."

No. How many times must I clarify this for you? Not justifying everything, only some things.


" Again, it's all assumed, and amounts to your internalization of official rhetoric to such an extreme degree that challenging it amounts to a kind of terrible heresy."

No heresy at all IMO.


"Few dispute that when combatting great evil, terrible things can be justified. Some obviously don't buy this, but they recognize the argument. It's not the point."

It is part of the picture which Chomsky conveniently leaves out of his selective reporting campaign designed to demonize the USA.


"The point is that you simply assume the alternatives to US actions are always worse: everything we do amounts to fighting bad guys."

No, but a lot of what we have done did involve fighting bad guys. Why do you continually confuse "part of" or "a lot of" with "all of"?


"Your Soviet counterpart could just as easily (and did) invoke the horrors of fascism to justify everything the Soviet Union did. But without solid evidence no one would take it seriously."

Whatever. I think you are trying to muddy the waters here a bit.


"With other countries, we ridicule quasi-religious apologists who insist that "good intentions" and "self-defense" be deemed self-evident. With the US, any departure from this assumption amounts, in the eyes of the state-worshipping right, as intolerable anti-American bias. Your posts here could hardly reflect this mentality more perfectly."

Again, I am not against constructive criticism of the USA but I feel that Chomsky's criticisms are deliberately designed for destructive purposes.


"Chomsky deserves venomous castigation ("deceitful, manipulative, twisted and sick") for failing to both assume and concede the existence of some greater evil prevented or at least targeted by all US conduct."

Anyone who doesn't think the USSR was more evil than the USA is an idiot or a communist or too young to know better. And AGAINB I am not arguing for "all" US conduct--I have spelled this out in repeated posts to you but you seem impervious to the point.


"As for your criticism of Chomsky's evidence, all you're doing is denouncing him for failing to do the same thing you fail to do: provide facts that justify bad US conduct. In fact, Chomsky has devoted tens of thousands of pages to citing and analyzing the rhetoric and reality of official justifications. You assume such justifications exist, and that they're almost always valid, and that the job of those who challenge your assumption is actually to prove it for you."

No, and my argument is not only that *some* evil was justified: it is also that such evils must be weighed against the evils of contemporary powers to derive a meaningful real-world rating of evils--because the world is so imperfect and some evils are unavoidable especially for behemoths, and more especially when behemoths collide.


"What seems to be driving your attitude is similar to the transparent motives behind much US apologist propaganda. It isn't that US excuses are valid or even plausible, but that in the absence of some excuse "others" might entertain evil thoughts and therefore come to menace Americans. In short, you'd have a tough time convincing all but the simplist minds that you believe in half of what you say. I'ts more of a compulsion to fill the void, plug the dike, with anything handy, lest we give moral support to the barbarians. It's the ubiquitous pandering to those that can't rise above their fear and hatred of the "other," one reason is so often crops up in the tabloids.

I'd advise working harder at gathering the evidence of justification instead of wasting it reading mirrors for your assumptions."

Take your lawyerese requests to the U.N....I think all rational persons who have studied history know which countries committed the greatest evils in the 20th century--except for maybe Chris Alger and Noam Chomsky.

Also, fear and loathing of Stalinism is NOT something that should be "risen above"--there are damn good reasons for fear and loathing of Stalinism--just as there were good reasons to fear Nazism and Maoism--and there are currently good reasons to fear Islamism (Islamic totalitarianism). These are not some bigoted irrational fears of "the other" but rather very prudent leeriness of totalitarianism. But you knew that, didn't you?

[MMMMMM]

No I am not suggesting that. I am suggesting that Chomsky was a Stalinist, based on his own words--and in my eyes, a Stalinist is a sick fukin creep. Ask Stalin or Mao's ghosts how many tens of millions they killed on just that sort of rationale Chomsky is advocating.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
My assumption is that some [but not all] of those acts [by the U.S] were so connected [to greater evils to the point of preventing them]."

[/ QUOTE ]
Okay, so which cases of US conduct do you acknowledge have no connection with preventing evil? In other words, on which issues would you agree with the "sik fuk" Noam Chomsky?

[Chris Alger]

Not suggesting what? Do you agree or disagree that Americans would be justified in using terror if the consequences of not using terror would be that they were reduced to the level of peasants in the Philippines?

[MMMMMM]

"Not suggesting what?"

I am not suggesting the following, which you ASKED if I was suggesting: "Are you suggesting that if "the consequences of not using terror would be that" all Americans would be forced to "live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines," that terror would not be justified?"


"Do you agree or disagree that Americans would be justified in using terror if the consequences of not using terror would be that they were reduced to the level of peasants in the Philippines?"

That is not a parallel question to that which Chomsky was advocating, nor do I think it highly revelvant to this discussion. I can see why an obfuscator, or one who thinks all things are equivalent, or a lawyer might be tempted to ask such a hypothetical question, though.

Instead of asking complex undefined overbroad hypothetical questions (do you really need for me to explain why it is not a parallel question?) why don't you try to stay on topic instead of stretching in attempts to find equivalences.

Chomsky was almost blatantly advocating Stalinist-style communism for the Vietnamese. Do you agree or disagree with that assessment?

[MMMMMM]

That is irrelevant as we are discussing the general, not specific, cases.

Yet even in those cases I would not agree with some of Chomsky's reasons for why they occurred. In particular he is wrong when he states that it is in US interest to keep other nations undeveloped economically. We gain much from healthy trade and business with developed entities such as Japan, Australia and the EU. Furthermore, developed democracies typically don't fight with democracies, so there is a security benefit to all when countries convert from tyranny to democracy.

Chomsky has too much of a zero-sum-game view of world economics (as does communism itself). Many relationships and synergies are very heavily plus-sum games in economics--as is overall business developoment. In fact I suspect that this erroneous zero-sum-game view of economics is what deludes many ignorant persons into sympathizing with the communist economic platform.

[Chris Alger]

Your typical evasiveness. You rant and rave about Chomsky opposition to the specific case of Vietnam, citing the "chilling" claim (based on an out of context quote, BTW) that terror could have been an be justified, and then refuse to take a position on whether it could be justified if Americans instead of Asians were involved. Obviously, you recognize your usual racist double standards beginning to emerge from the haze of your writing and don't have the honesty to confront or defend them.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
Chomsky was almost blatantly advocating Stalinist-style communism for the Vietnamese. Do you agree or disagree with that assessment?

[/ QUOTE ]
Of course he wasn't; his condemnation of the Soviet state and its clones is well known. That much would have been clear had you read the article in your own post and the author's tortured attempts to avoid that fact. To wit: he claims that Chomsky advocated a Soviet-style system for Vietnam, indeed that Chomsky has done this in every essay criticizing the war over 40 years, but offers no quote or citation where Chomsky has done anything of the sort. Then, when he tackles the substance of his claim, it turns out that he's really talking about Chomsky's argument as to why the land reform killings in the North from 1953-56 were exaggerated by the U.S. press. Not exactly an endorsement of Stalin or Soviet-style communism, is it?

[MMMMMM]

"Your typical evasiveness. You rant and rave about Chomsky opposition to the specific case of Vietnam, citing the "chilling" claim (based on an out of context quote, BTW) that terror could have been an be justified, and then refuse to take a position on whether it could be justified if Americans instead of Asians were involved. Obviously, you recognize your usual racist double standards beginning to emerge from the haze of your writing and don't have the honesty to confront or defend them."

This is bullsh!t.

We are talking about whether Chomsky supported Stalinist (or Maoist) style communism for Vietnam--not about what M's personal views are on hypothetical questions engineered by Chris Alger.

There are also more differences to the examples than the single difference you cite...the differences are not solely whether it involves Americans or Asians.

Please try to stay on topic--as you managed to do in a post higher up in this thread where you raised doubt in my mind as to what Chomsky may have intended by his words cited in the posted article.

[MMMMMM]

"Of course he wasn't; his condemnation of the Soviet state and its clones is well known. That much would have been clear had you read the article in your own post and the author's tortured attempts to avoid that fact. To wit: he claims that Chomsky advocated a Soviet-style system for Vietnam, indeed that Chomsky has done this in every essay criticizing the war over 40 years, but offers no quote or citation where Chomsky has done anything of the sort. Then, when he tackles the substance of his claim, it turns out that he's really talking about Chomsky's argument as to why the land reform killings in the North from 1953-56 were exaggerated by the U.S. press. Not exactly an endorsement of Stalin or Soviet-style communism, is it?"

I will have to think about this; maybe you are right, Chris, although it seems rather hard to reconcile Chomsky's quote with your assessment.

[Gamblor]

Saw this and I am refraining from responding from these posts until my copy arrives and I have read it.