Another rabid ex-trot attacks our Noam.

[Professor Rat.]

Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize 
the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, 
he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the far 
more extreme terrorismof United States foreign policy. Despite its 
calculated affront to mainstream opinion, this sentiment went down very 
well with Chomskys own constituency. He has never been more popular among 
the academic and intellectual left than he is today.

Two books of interviews with him published since September 11, 2001 both 
went straight onto the bestseller lists.[1] One of them has since been 
turned into a film entitled Power and Terror, now doing brisk business in 
the art-house movie market. In March 2002 the films director, John 
Junkerman, accompanied his subject to the University of California, 
Berkeley, where in a five-day visit Chomsky gave five political talks to a 
total audience of no fewer than five thousand people.

Meanwhile, the liberal news media around the world has sought him out for 
countless interviews as the most promi- nent intellectual opposed to the 
American response to the terrorist attacks. Newspaper articles routinely 
open by reminding readers of his awesome intellectual status. A profile 
headlined Conscience of a Nationin the English daily The Guardian declared: 
Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible as one of the ten most 
quoted sources in the humanitiesand is the only writer among them still 
alive.The New York Times has called him arguably the most important 
intellectual alive.

Chomsky has used his status, originally gained in the field of linguistics, 
to turn himself into the leading voice of the American left. He is not 
merely a spokesman. His own stance has done much to structure left-wing 
politics over the past forty years. Today, when actors, rock stars, and 
protesting students mouth anti-American slogans for the cameras, they are 
very often expressing sentiments they have gleaned from Chomskys voluminous 
output.

Hence, to examine Chomskys views is to analyze the core mindset of 
contemporary radicalism, especially the variety that now holds so much sway 
in the academic and arts communities.

Chomsky has been a celebrity radical since the mid-1960s when he made his 
name as an anti-Vietnam War activist. Although he lost some of his appeal 
in the late-1970s and 1980s by his defense of the Pol Pot regime in 
Cambodia, he has used September 11 to restore his reputation, indeed to 
surpass his former influence and stature. At seventy-four years of age, he 
is today the doyen of the American and much of the worlds intellectual left.

He is, however, an unconventional academic radical. Over the past thirty 
years, the left in the humanities has been smitten by high theory, 
especially neo-Marxist, feminist, and postmodernist philosophy out of 
Germany and France. Much of this material was arcane enough in its own 
language but in translation it elevated obscurantism to a badge of 
prestige. It inundated the humanities with relativism both in epistemology 
and moral philosophy.

In contrast, Chomsky has produced no substantial body of political theory 
of his own. Nor is he a relativist. He advocates the pursuit of truth and 
knowledge about human affairs and promotes a simple, universal set of moral 
principles. Moreover, his political writings are very clear, pitched to a 
general rather than specialist audience. He supports his claims not by 
appeals to some esoteric conceptual apparatus but by presenting plain, 
apparently factual evidence. The explanation for his current appeal, 
therefore, needs to be sought not in recent intellectual fashions but in 
something with a longer history.

Chomsky is the most prominent intellectual remnant of the New Left of the 
1960s. In many ways he epitomized the New Left and its hatred of Amerika,a 
country he believed, through its policies both at home and abroad, had 
descended into fascism. In his most famous book of the Sixties, American 
Power and the New Mandarins, Chomsky said what America needed was a kind of 
denazification.

Of all the major powers in the Sixties, according to Chomsky, America was 
the most reprehensible. Its principles of liberal democracy were a sham. 
Its democracy was a four-year dictatorshipand its economic commitment to 
free markets was merely a disguise for corporate power. Its foreign policy 
was positively evil. By any objective standard,he wrote at the time, the 
United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the 
greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to 
international cooperation.

As an anti-war activist, Chomsky participated in some of the most 
publicized demonstrations, including the attempt, famously celebrated in 
Norman Mailers Armies of the Night, to form a human chain around the 
Pentagon. Chomsky described the event as tens of thousands of young people 
surrounding what they believe to beI must add that I agreethe most hideous 
institution on this earth.

This kind of anti-Americanism was common on the left at the time but there 
were two things that made Chomsky stand out from the crowd. He was a 
scholar with a remarkable reputation and he was in tune with the 
anti-authoritarianism of the student-based New Left.

At the time, the traditional left was still dominated by an older 
generation of Marxists, who were either supporters of the Communist Party 
or else Trotskyists opposed to Joseph Stalin and his heirs but who still 
endorsed Lenin and Bolshevism. Either way, the emerging generation of 
radical students saw both groups as compromised by their support for the 
Russian Revolution and the repressive regimes it had bequeathed to eastern 
Europe.

Chomsky was not himself a member of the student generationin 1968 he was a 
forty-year-old tenured professorbut his lack of party membership or any 
other formal political commitment absolved him of any connection to the Old 
Left. Instead, his adherence to anarchism, or what he called libertarian 
socialism,did much to shape the outlook of the New Left.

American Power and the New Mandarins approvingly quotes the 
nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicting that the version of 
socialism supported by Karl Marx would end up transferring state power not 
to the workers but to the elitist cadres of the Communist Party itself.

Despite his anti-Bolshevism, Chomsky remained a supporter of socialist 
revolution. He urged that a true social revolutionwould transform the 
masses so they could take power into their own hands and run institutions 
themselves. His favorite real-life political model was the short-lived 
anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 19361937 during the Spanish Civil 
War.

etc...

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/may03/chomsky.htm

Windsock windshuttle joins James A.Donald,David Horowitz,Stephen 
Schwartz,Chris Hitchens,Michael Costa and no doubt many more loony 
ex-trotskyists over to the lunar right.