-Biplab Pal,12/20/05
"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".
David Horowitz
Though professors of political, social and economic science have thrown him out as a mere 'hippi' jerk, popularity of Mr Chomsky and his brand of anarchic radicalism seems to have drawn more supporters from Islamic world than any sane section of world population. His half baked political theories of anti-Americanism based on rumors than facts are not only laughable but the worst part is, despite his open endorsement to Islamic fascism, a major section of our leftist friends hail him like a hero of our modern time! It is well known for quite a few decades that Islamists and leftists are more of a bed-partner of convenience but it is only in recent time, Muslim world found their best friend in this political anarchist of America-Noam Chomsky! A linguist by research but seems to have earned his fame through his anti-American jihad on anything and everything.
He has been reflexively hostile to the United States, exaggerating its alleged crimes and iniquity, while downplaying the crimes of its enemies.
In "American Power and the New Mandarins" in 1968, Chomsky said that in the United States, "to me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification”. Paul Krugman in a exchange with Kathleen Sullivan, describes Chomsky as epitomizing "the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western intervention"
Mr Krugman further writes on Chomsky:
As I read your remarks about how Kosovo reverses the usual left/right roles on intervention, I found myself wondering what Noam Chomsky--who epitomized the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western intervention--is saying now. Well, I couldn't find anything about the current crisis, but thanks to the miracle of search engine technology I did find some remarks about Bosnia, which are pathetic but revealing: First he tries to blame it all on the Western Right, then suddenly gets all judicious and practical..
The truth, I think, is that the very success of America--our emergence as the world's overwhelming superpower--creates a set of moral dilemmas for the left.
While Mr Krugman’s observation about the leftists is more than correct, I always wonder whether today’s leftists, including Noam Chomsky read Karl Marx at all. Unfortunate truth is, America’s triumphant capitalism endorses success of Marxism many times more than failure of Leninism in Soviet Russia. In his book “ Profit over people’ Mr Chomsky displayed his glaring and blistering knowledge of free-trade which he thinks, is a WTO enforced phenomena started with Regan! While I was reading his book, it was explicitly clear to me, Mr Chomsky never read much of Marxist writing on free-trade. Had he been chosen the harder way of learning Marxism rather than feeding philanthropic appetite of anti-Americanism, he would have learned that free-trade and battle of protectionism existed even as early as 18th century:
The Repeal of the Corn Laws in England is the greatest triumph of free trade in the 19th century. In every country where manufacturers talk of free trade, they have in mind chiefly free trade in corn and raw materials in general. To impose protective duties on foreign corn is infamous, it is to speculate on the famine of peoples.
Cheap food, high wages, this is the sole aim for which English free-traders have spent millions, and their enthusiasm has already spread to their brethren on the Continent. Generally speaking, those who wish for free trade desire it in order to alleviate the condition of the working class.
[ Karl Marx “On the Question of Free Trade”: MECW Volume 6, p. 450;]
Quite naturally, his sensible old Marxist friends started getting disillusioned about his increasing insanity. Adrian Hastings, reviewing The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo in 2001, writes,
"Chomsky just has not entered deeply into what he is talking about and he is not greatly interested in anything except digging out material for anti-American invective."
“Chomsky’s scathing indictment of NATO intervention in Kosovo is packed with information and diatribe relating to numerous episodes of American foreign policy in the twentieth century and, indeed, still earlier. It is precise, bitterly sarcastic and merciless in analysis. Could it really be the case, he asks, that a government with so criminal a record, one which has for years undermined the United Nations and refused to sign almost any significant agreement to strengthen international law, should suddenly in the late 1990s start to behave differently, using military power in a new, humanitarian way for the benefit of the world at large rather than ruthlessly pursue its own selfish agenda? Essentially this book is not about Kosovo. It is an attack by an American intellectual on American state policy as also on American commentators who have written idealistically about the war in Kosovo as constituting ‘a landmark in international relations’. The European and the Balkanist can hardly not feel that he is overhearing another round in an over-heated debate for which Kosovo is little more than an excuse.”
However, his separation from mainstream leftists seems to have reached a dot end after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when a number of leftists criticized Chomsky's immediate response to the attacks, alleging that not only he showed little sympathy for the victims, his comments showed utter distaste in the wake of horrible tragedy of 9/11. I am presenting his scholarly thoughts and remarks on 9/11:
| A Quick Reaction Noam Chomsky CounterPunch, September 12, 2001 |
| The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do 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 probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. |
In October 2001, Chomsky described the US attacks on Afghanistan as a "silent genocide" that would kill millions by starvation. On November 10 he explained that "What the effects will be, we will never know", arguing that if there were millions of deaths, "nobody's going to look because the West is not interested in such things and others don't have the resources."
In response to Noam Comsky style anarchism, Todd Gitlin wrote in outrage (The Guardian, September 2001):
At this moment, American outrage is not only fierce, it is utterly and plainly human and it is justified. Sneering critics like Noam Chomsky, who condemn the executioners of thousands only in passing, would not hesitate to honor the vengeful feelings of Palestinians subjected to Israeli occupation. They have no standing.
In a September 2002 article in The Nation discussing the American left's reaction to the September 11 attacks, Adam Shatz observed that Chomsky had denounced the attacks, but claimed that he "seemed irritable" in the interviews he gave just after September 11, "as if he couldn't quite connect to the emotional reality of American suffering", and described Chomsky's subsequent references to atrocities carried out by the American government and its allies as "a wooden recitation".
Chomsky's reaction to the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC were widely criticized from people on different sides of the political spectrum, who believed he was attempting to rationalize the actions. One critic was author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, who had previously been a supporter of Chomsky's work. In an exchange between the two, Hitchens also said that Chomsky's opposition to military action in Afghanistan coupled with his portrayal of the NATO military action in the Balkans as naked aggression and persecution of the Serbs as evidence that Chomsky was in fact soft on terrorism and fascism. He also characterized Chomsky's comparison between al-Qaeda's attacks and the 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical facility as a form of "moral equivalence". Chomsky argued that the consequences, rather than the moral intent, might be comparable. According to Chomsky, "Hitchens condemns the claim of 'facile "moral equivalence" between the two crimes.' Fair enough, but since he fabricated the claim out of thin air, I feel no need to comment." Chomsky's suggestion that 10,000 people died as a result of the attack on the pharmaceutical plant, though, has been disputed.
Here is the selected excerpts from Christopher Hitchen aginst Chomsky style rationalization of 9/11 event.
“…
One iota of such innate fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan of September 11 to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in August 1998….
Yet when a stand was eventually mounted against Milosevic, it was Noam Chomsky and Sam Husseini, among many others, who described the whole business as a bullying persecution of--the Serbs! I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism…
Concluding, then. I have begun to think that Noam Chomsky has lost or is losing the qualities that made him a great moral and political tutor in the years of the Indochina war, and that enabled him to write such monumental essays as his critique of the Kahan Commission on Sabra and Shatila or his analysis of the situation in East Timor. I don't say this out of any "more in sorrow than anger" affectation: I have written several defenses of him and he knows it. But the last time we corresponded, some months ago, I was appalled by the robotic element both of his prose and of his opinions...
Samantha Power, in an otherwise sympathetic review of Hegemony or Survival (New York Times Book Review, January 2004), writes:
For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America, the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those categorized as oppressed receive scant mention. Because he deems American foreign policy inherently violent and expansionist, he is unconcerned with the motives behind particular policies, or the ethics of particular individuals in government. And since he considers the United States the leading terrorist state, little distinguishes American air strikes in Serbia undertaken at night with high-precision weaponry from World Trade Center attacks timed to maximize the number of office workers who have just sat down with their morning coffee.
It is inconceivable, in Chomsky's view, that American power could be harnessed for good. Thus, the billions of dollars in foreign aid earmarked each year for disaster relief, schools, famine prevention, AIDS treatment, etc. -- and the interventions in Kosovo and East Timor -- have to be explained away. The Kosovo and Timor operations' prime achievement, he writes, was to establish the norm of resort to force without Security Council authorization. On this both the Kosovars and the Timorese, whose welfare Chomsky has heroically championed over the years, would strongly disagree.
In a talk given in 1997, Chomsky ridiculed the concept of "anti-Americanism" as a symptom of totalitarian thinking: "It's the kind of term you only find in totalitarian societies, as far as I know. So like in the Soviet Union, anti-Sovietism was considered the gravest of all crimes." I am citing his full speech to expose to what extent this man has lost his sense to claim Iran is more liberal than America!
A lot of religion gets thrown in. Remember that the United States is an extremely fundamentalist country. You look at comparative statistics, usually religious fundamentalism declines as industrialization goes up, it's a pretty close correlation. The United States is off the chart. It ranks with devastated peasant societies. Probably more fundamentalist than Iran. Why this is so, I don't know. I mean, the fact is it's a complicated question
Well such is the true genius of a man called Noam Chomsky. Perhaps, somebody never asked him, had he said the same in Iran, how long he would have survived in the dark prison of Khomeini? Or whether comfort of his multi-million dollar home and yet being vocal against America for anything and everything is available in 10ft by 10ft prison cells of Iran?
Conservative author David Horowitz is one of Chomsky's more vocal critics. He has described Chomsky as the "Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate" and "the most treacherous intellect in America" claiming Chomsky has "one message alone: America is the Great Satan", in a series of articles along with historian Ronald Radosh .
Horowitz claims "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".
Peter Collier and David Horowitz compiled a set of critical essays in 2004, called The Anti-Chomsky Reader, that analyze some of Chomsky's more popular work. The Anti-Chomsky Reader argues that many of the sources in Chomsky's works are himself. Thomas Nichols' essay Chomsky And The Cold War discusses Chomsky's attitude towards anti-communists after the Soviet Union fell apart. There is also extensive criticism of Chomsky's claim that the US invasion of Afghanistan might result in millions of deaths, labeled by some critics as the "Silent Genocide" claim, named after his quote, "Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide".
Full excerpt from Noam Chomsky:
“After the first week of bombing, the New York Times reported on a back page inside a column on something else, that by the arithmetic of the United Nations there will soon be 7.5 million Afghans in acute need of even a loaf of bread and there are only a few weeks left before the harsh winter will make deliveries to many areas totally impossible, continuing to quote, but with bombs falling the delivery rate is down to 1/2 of what is needed. Casual comment. Which tells us that Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that. On the same day, the leader of Western civilization dismissed with contempt, once again, offers of negotiation for delivery of the alleged target, Osama bin Laden, and a request for some evidence to substantiate the demand for total capitulation. It was dismissed. On the same day the Special Rapporteur of the UN in charge of food pleaded with the United States to stop the bombing to try to save millions of victims”
Of course what happened was that the U.S./Northern Alliance combination rolled through Afghanistan so quickly that the World Food Program and others were able to meet goals for food shipment that likely would not have been met under the Taliban's rule
Shortly afterward, on November 10, 2001, Chomsky tried to spin his claims by saying that millions might still die from starvation -- the world would simply never know because no one would bother to investigate (apparently Chomsky still hasn't learned from his Cambodian fiasco that large numbers of deaths will inevitably show up in population statistics -- it's almost impossible to hide large scale deaths).
At that time, Chomsky said,
The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) had already warned, even before the bombing, that over seven million people would face starvation if military action were initiated. After the bombing began, it advised that the threat of a humanitarian catastrophe in the short term was very grave, and furthermore that the bombing has disrupted the planting of 80 per cent of the country's grain supplies, so that the effects next year will be even more severe.
What the effects will be, we will never know. Starvation is not something that kills people instantly. People eat roots and leaves and they drag on for a while. And the effects of starvation may be the death of children born from malnourished mothers a year or two from now, and all sorts of consequences. Furthermore, nobody's going to look because the West is not interested in such things and others don't have the resources.
The last paragraph is ridiculous for somebody such as Chomsky to make. If there had been large scale starvation deaths from starvation, it would have been almost impossible to hide.
Fast forward two years, and a reader of the Independent asked Chomsky, "Where is the 'silent genocide' you predicted would happen in Afghanistan if the US intervened there in 2001?" to which Chomsky replied in his defense,
That is an interesting fabrication, which gives a good deal of insight into the prevailing moral and intellectual culture. First the facts: I predicted nothing. Rather, I reported the grim warnings from virtually every knowledgeable source that the attack might lead to an awesome humanitarian catastrophe, and the bland announcements in the press that Washington had ordered Pakistan to eliminate "truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population."All of this is precisely accurate and entirely appropriate. The warnings remain accurate as well, a truism that should be unnecessary to explain.
Unfortunately, it is apparently necessary to add a moral truism: actions are evaluated in terms of the range of anticipated consequences. Which is so typical of Chomsky in his attempt to be the new Messiah of Muslim kingdoms.
Although a Jew and a self-described Zionist (though he admits his definition of Zionism is usually considered anti-Zionism today), Chomsky has called for the dismantling of the State of Israel for most of his career. He advocated instead a "bi-national" state with an Arab majority. Because of his advocacy for the end of the current Isreali state, the Faurisson affair, and for other such reasons, Chomsky is often accused of being a self-hating Jew, charges which Chomsky strenuously denies.
Chomsky has also made statements regarding the Jewish religion - describing it, for instance, as "genocidal" - and Jewish power which have led many to regard him as an anti-semite. One such statement claimed that the Jews are now "the most privileged" group in the United States and that anti-Semitism "hardly exists in the West". He has further claimed that the accusation of anti-Semitism is a tool of the powerful used to consolidate their power. Of course Iranian foreign minister who wants to nuke out Israel from the world map or wants to push the Jews to Alaska would find a great friend in Mr. Chomsky.
In 2002, the president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers drew attention by claiming that the "Noam Chomsky-led campaign" to have universities divest from companies with Israeli holdings is "anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intention". Although Chomsky signed a petition in support of divestment, which states in part, "We also call on MIT and Harvard to divest from Israel", he has expressed reservations about the boycott campaign.
Conclusion:
Absence of organized leftist ideas in United States created a vacuum for addressing grievance of capitalism. As a result, anarchist radical like Noam Chomsky is in demand even without having any background of Marxism. But he understands ‘market-demand’ of anti-capitalism quite well and used it to make his fortune of millions. Even if that means supporting Islamic terrorism. Rationalizing 9/11. And never speaking or writing anything against Islamic atrocity against non-Muslims or Muslim women. I have no problem with that because he essentially proves the success of capitalism in preserving liberalism and in utilization of market opportunities. But I have serious concern and utter despise for his brand of neoliberalism which has already crossed its limit in fueling inspiration to fascist force of Islam.
Source:
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
[2] “Profit over people” by Noam Chomsky
[3] The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo by Noam Chomsky
[4] Middle East Illusions by Noam Chomsky
[5]Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky
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