After 9\/11 the left disinterred Chomsky and put him back on a pedestal. The New York Times, for example, ran a ridiculously fawning profile of him. He was being mainstreamed again and I felt strongly that someone had to say something.<\/p>\n
There are a couple of main points that should be made. First, Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I\u2019m not necessarily talking about his public critics. <\/p>\n
If you’ve ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it’s quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it. I don’t think anyone ought to be allowed to get away with that kind of behavior.<\/p>\n
Second, Chomsky is immensely important to the radical left. When it comes to American foreign policy he isn’t just influential, he’s basically all they have. Almost any argument made about foreign affairs by the radical left can be traced back to him. That wasn’t the case when he started out back in the late ’60s, but it is now.<\/p>\n
Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian. Despite his claims otherwise, he’s more or less the last survivor of a group of intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but when you look at the regimes and groups he’s supported, it\u2019s a very bloody list indeed.<\/p>\n
Communism and fascism are obviously dead as the proverbial doornail, but I doubt the totalitarian temptation will ever go away. The desire for unity and a kind of beautiful tyranny seems to spring from somewhere deep in the human psyche.<\/p>\n
Fourth\u2014and this may be most important\u2014he makes people stupid. In this sense, he’s more like a cult leader or a New Age guru than an intellectual. <\/p>\n
He allows people to be comfortable with their prejudices and their hatreds, and he undercuts their ability to think in a critical manner. To an extent, this has to do with his use of emotional and moral blackmail. <\/p>\n
Since he portrays everyone who disagrees with him as evil, if you do agree with him you must be on the side of good and right. This is essentially a kind of secular puritanism, and it’s very appealing to many people, for obvious reasons, I think. We all want to think well of ourselves, whether we deserve it or not.<\/p>\n
There is an intellectual side to this, as well. You see it clearly in his famous debate with Michel Foucault. Chomsky says at one point that there is a moral and ethical order that is hardwired into human beings. And Foucault basically asks him, why? How do you know this hardwired morality exists? And even if it exists, how can we know that it is, in fact, moral in the first place? We may feel it to be moral, but that doesn’t make it true.<\/p>\n
Chomsky’s answer is essentially: Because I believe it to be so. Now, whatever that is, it isn’t thinking. In fact, it’s an excuse for not thinking. <\/p>\n
Ironically, Chomsky later said that Foucault was the most amoral man he ever met, whereas I would argue that Foucault was simply pointing out that Chomsky’s \u201cmorality\u201d is in fact a form of nihilism.<\/p>\n
I think people come to Chomsky and essentially worship him for precisely that reason. He allows them to feel justified in their refusal to think. They never have to ask themselves any difficult questions or provide any difficult answers. It\u2019s a form of intellectual cowardice essentially, but I’m sure you can see its appeal.<\/p>\n
I think you’ll agree that, of all the bad things people are capable of, their refusal to think is one of the worst, mainly because it leads to most of the other bad things of which they are capable.<\/p>\n
In one of his earliest books, Chomsky wrote that America requires a process of de-Nazification. He has denied saying this, but again, it’s right there in black and white. <\/p>\n
I think its impossible to understand Chomsky’s politics without understanding that, to him, the US is morally equivalent to Nazi Germany and needs to be dealt with accordingly. It should be noted, by the way, that this was a very important aspect of post-war Stalinist propaganda, and I have no doubt that Chomsky adopted it from that rather dubious source…<\/p>\n
I think that, in the beginning, he may have believed that it (Pol Pot\u2019s genocide in Cambodia) was all a frame-up by the New York Times and the US-Nazi alliance or whoever else he made up to blame it on. No doubt a great deal of wishful thinking on his part was involved, but it\u2019s possible he was sincere in his conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n
Then, as the facts became more difficult to deny and he started looking worse as a result, things got more complicated. At some point, he must have realized that he was saying things that in all likelihood were false. My guess is that he justified it in two ways: First, by relativizing it. Something along the lines of \u201cwhatever the Khmer Rouge may have done, it can’t be as bad as what America did in Vietnam, or Chile, or Indonesia, etc. Therefore, I am justified in continuing to defend the regime.\u201d Second, by demonizing his opponents, by saying \u201cwhatever the Khmer Rouge may have done, it’s more important not to allow my opponents to win, because they are evil, and it is morally wrong to allow evil to win.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, when the really horrendous scope of the genocide became clear, he was faced with having to admit he’d been wrong and owning up to it publicly. That is something Chomsky has never done and will never do. Perhaps he has a very fragile ego under all the bluster. It certainly seems like it. <\/p>\n
In any event, blaming anything and everything bad that happens in the world on the United States has always been Chomsky’s default position. So once he’d exhausted all other possibilities of escape, that’s what he fell back on. And he’ll keep doing it until his dying day. You will never get a mea culpa from him on anything, and certainly not on Cambodia, which is probably the biggest disgrace of his career…<\/p>\n
The Khmer Rouge justified its violence by claiming it was wiping out the urban bourgeoisie and that this was a necessary use of force whose purpose was to achieve a more just society. In other words, the people they killed deserved it. Chomsky may have bought this argument. He certainly hasn’t shied away from it in other cases. <\/p>\n
Remember, in terms of motive what the Khmer Rouge did wasn’t hugely different from what most other radical Left regimes have done when they seized power. The major difference is one of scale. That is, in terms of the number of people dead and especially in terms of the percentage of the population that was annihilated, the Khmer Rouge was disproportionately bloodthirsty…<\/p>\n
In a certain sense Chomsky was a bit late to the game on Israel, though he more than made up for it afterwards. It didn’t begin with him. <\/p>\n
The New Left was already moving against Israel as far back as the mid-1960s. It really starts with the Suez War in 1956, when Israel turns decisively against the USSR and pivots toward the West. The Soviets started pumping out the anti-Israel propaganda, and people in the Western Left naturally started falling into line. And certainly, the rise of a certain kind of Third World-ism that fetishized the Arab war against Israel predated Chomsky’s emergence as a major voice on the anti-Israel Left. <\/p>\n
It’s also important to remember that, despite Chomsky’s intense hatred of Israel, his real idee fixe has always been the United States. It’s only as Israel starts to draw closer to the US following the Six Day War, and especially after the Yom Kippur War, that he really gets going.<\/p>\n
It’s for this reason that the question of his remaining pro-Israel really isn’t a question at all. As soon as Israel became an important ally of the United States, Chomsky could never have been pro-Israel even if he’d wanted to be. It would have thrown his entire worldview into disarray.<\/p>\n
I would say, though, that he solidified the position of the Left on Israel and certainly gave it a lot of ammunition. He also played an important role in giving anti-Israel ideas a legitimate place in the American intellectual debate\u2014especially in academia\u2014and in making it a sort of litmus test for Jewish Leftists. <\/p>\n
A lot of the things he wrote in the wake of the Six Day War were denunciations of fellow Jewish Leftists for not being \u201creal\u201d Leftists because of their Zionism. So as a collaborator in what was basically a purge, and in ensuring that Jewish Leftists knew that the price of their continued participation in the movement was their support for Israel, he did play an essential part. <\/p>\n
He was also one of the anti-Israel Left’s first and probably most important shields against accusations of Anti-Semitism. Since he was one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals in America at the time (mainly for his linguistics work), he gave the anti-Israel Left a lot of cover, and allowed them to escape responsibility for the Anti-Semitic aspects of their ideology for a long time. <\/p>\n
It was really only with the Second Intifada that people finally started speaking out against Leftwing Anti-Semitism, which was mainly the fault of the movement itself. They’d gotten a free pass for so long that they probably thought it would go on forever. In a sense, thankfully, this has to count as one of Chomsky’s greatest failures…<\/p>\n
It’s important to point out that most of what Chomsky says is driven by emotion rather than intellect. His tone is very intellectual, in that he speaks in a very quiet, measured style most of the time. But the content is clearly driven by what can only be called a species of hysteria. I obviously don’t know him personally, but he seems to be at heart an extremely angry man, and I would guess that his anger is driven by something that is ultimately not political.<\/p>\n
I will say, though, that one thing you realize very quickly when you deal with Chomsky at length is that he is very conscious of his audience. He often says one thing to a \u201cred meat\u201d type of crowd and something quite different\u2014sometimes the opposite\u2014to a potentially less sympathetic audience. Sometimes you even find both within the same speech or article.<\/p>\n
A classic example is his comments on 9\/11. First he condemns the attack, and then he spends several pages justifying it. Another is his claims about American democracy. In some of his earlier books, he quite obviously thinks that America is a kind of quasi-dictatorship or oligarchic tyranny in which democracy and freedom are a sham. Then after 9\/11 his audience balloons in size, and suddenly he’s talking about how free American society is. A reader can essentially pick one or the other, depending on his inclinations…<\/p>\n
Now there are many, many cases over the last century of intellectuals lending their minds or simply their names to dubious causes, and over time we’ve developed a certain sense of what the responsibility of the intellectual ought to be. It obviously isn’t an easy question. Was Jean Paul Sartre a monster, for example, because he was a Stalinist for a time? I would say no, though he did have an awful lot to answer for.<\/p>\n
In the case of Chomsky, however, I think we have one of the most egregious cases. He didn’t just support an ideology, he essentially created it, or at least played a major\u2014perhaps the decisive\u2014role in doing so. And there isn’t just one case of lending his skills to justifying horrendous acts of political evil, there are many. <\/p>\n
And as I noted before, he has never owned up to any of them and as far as I can tell never will. What we’re looking at with Chomsky is a man who has dedicated essentially his entire public life to political evil. I think we are justified in calling such a person a monster.<\/p>\n
_____<\/p>\n
From an interview of Benjamin Kerstein<\/a> in World Affairs<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After 9\/11 the left disinterred Chomsky and put him back on a pedestal. The New York Times, for example, ran a ridiculously fawning profile of him. He was being mainstreamed again and I felt strongly that someone had to say something. There are a couple of main points that should be made. First, Chomsky is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5,9,6],"tags":[5756,5752,5755,1980,1419,5751,5753,5748,5754,5750],"class_list":["post-2519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-europe","category-politics","tag-benjamin-kerstein","tag-cambodia","tag-chomsky","tag-indonesia","tag-israel","tag-jean-paul-sartre","tag-michel-foucault","tag-noam-chomsky","tag-pol-pot","tag-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}