chen@intuit.com (Mark Chen) writes an amazing article worthy of Chomky himself I note that Chomsky fans, like Chomksy himself, have no shame in lying bare faced in public.
There is no mention anywhere of moral superiority. There is a statement of the demonstrable fact that "the editors and the ambassador, in the not very distant past, have supported racist murder on a scale that exceeds Amin's wildest fantasies," referring, perhaps, to the (then) ....
One: Chomsky's claim clearly implies a claim of extreme moral superiority. Two: Your claim, and Chomsky's claim, is a flagrant lie Amin murdered three hundred thousand people, ate a few of them, and daydreamed out loud of extending a similar rule over all of black Africa. 2.1. Even if the Ambassador and the editors of the New York times had personally commanded the repression and man made famine in East Timor they could not have clocked up as many as Amin did in real life, let alone in Amin's "wildest fantasies". 2.2 It is completely false that the New York times supported the genocide in East Timor. They were sympathetic to, or tolerant of, the wrong side in East Timor, but, unlike Chomsky, they did not support genocide. Nothing the New York times said or did remotely compares with Chomsky's enthusiastic support of Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia. Chomsky compared Pol Pot's genocide to the denazification by the French Resistance after world war II. When did the New York Times compare Indonesia's repression in East Timor to reconstruction after the American Civil War? More rationally, Mark Chen claims that I have failed to make my case that Chomsky is seeking to achieve a totalitarian state in America by democratic, constitutional, and institutional methods, as the National German Socialist Workers party did in Germany, rather than by revolutionary methods, as the Bolsheviks did in Russia. Certainly it is true that Chomsky never says in so many words "Hey let us imitate the great methods that Pol Pot used in order to make sure the will of the people prevails over the immensely powerful secret conspiracy by evil racist capitalist imperialists." But Chomsky defines peoples free choice to say one thing rather than another thing, to listen to one source rather than another source, to be "extreme coercion and control". With this definition, it obviously follows that exterminating those who engage in "extreme coercion and control" is an act of self defence. When a socialist argues labor theory of value, I know he is planning to rob me. In the same way, when Chomsky argues that speech is coercion, and choice is submission, I know that he and his pals in the government are planning to enhance our civil liberties by protecting us from that speech, and to enhance our lives by rescuing us from that submission. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. jamesd@netcom.com