The Full Chomsky

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Nov 10 13:20:43 PST 2004


<http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/c-e/chapin/2004/chapin111004.htm>

 MensNewsDaily.com


The Full Chomsky

 November 10, 2004
 by Bernard Chapin

 Question: How could a linguist working as a college professor have
omniscient insight regarding the inner-workings of the American government
and exclusive knowledge concerning the hidden motivations of every
government official in our nation's history?

 Answer: There's no way he could.

 Yet, such common sense does little to refute the fact that Noam Chomsky is
one of the ten most quoted figures in the humanities. He has published
screed after screed deconstructing American foreign policy positions and
never has given any indication that his insinuations may somehow be limited
by lack of connections or first hand evidence (or, in some cases, any
evidence whatsoever). Since the 1960s, he has fully played the role of
Wizard Professor and created an entire library's worth of "pseudo-academic
smog" .

 Until recently, there have been few antidotes for his morass of
accusations and allegations, but now we have The Anti-Chomsky Reader,
edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, which offers purchasers the
service of deconstructing the deconstructor. Once you've finished reading
it, you'll be highly grateful as Chomsky's lies are so pervasive and
counter-intuitive that it's a wonder anyone but the paranoid ever read him
in the first place.

 The Anti-Chomsky Reader is a compilation of essays outlining and refuting
the travesties that the M.I.T. linguist has passed off as truth. It does
not confine itself to politics alone. Substantial space is given to the
analysis of his scholarly publications in linguistics. These are addressed
in two chapters called, "A Corrupted Linguistics" and "Chomsky, Language,
World War II and Me." In the area of his chosen field, many have given him
an intellectual pass but this work does not. His linguistic ideas may be as
spurious as his political tomes. All sources give him initial credit for
his core academic assumption about the "biological basis of grammar," but
it seems that he has engaged in little in the way of scientifically
verifiable work over the course of the last fifty years. Chomsky's creative
terminology dazzles admirers but his new theories inevitably amount to
nothing

 Overall, the compendium leaves no region of his reputation left
unexamined. Anti-Americanism is central to his worldview. He never sees
this nation as being superior to any other. At best, we mirror the
pathologies of totalitarian states. We can discern this clearly in Stephen
Morris's "Whitewashing Dictatorship in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia." The
author sums up Chomsky's fetish for defending the Vietnamese and Democratic
Kampuchea aptly when he argues that,

 "As a radical political ideologue, he is crippled by an intense emotional
commitment to the cause of anti-Americanism. Operating on the principle
that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend,' he wholeheartedly embraced the
struggle of two of the world's most ruthlessly brutal regimes."

 Chomsky's hopes for mankind are vested in murderous revolutionaries and
not in his own nation. It is our nation, and never the Khmer Rouge, which
gives its citizens the freedom to vote, the freedom to trade, and, most
obviously, the freedom to spread the type of sedition that Noam Chomsky has
been disseminating for close to 40 years.

 He does not limit himself to Asia, however. The professor has constantly
minimized the acts of many totalitarian states. Chomsky regarded Soviet
control of eastern Europe, when compared to the American presence in
Vietnam, as being "practically a paradise" We see a man who cares far more
about Holocaust deniers than the six million who were exterminated in gas
chambers or desolate Russian ravines.

 After 9/11, he was more concerned about a fictitious famine in Afghanistan
than about the nearly 3,000 incinerated in The World Trade Center attacks.
He predicted that the toppling of the Taliban would result in 3 to 4
million famine deaths. When no such famine occurred, he did not issue an
apology or retraction. He simply chose to say nothing.

 There is not much about this world famous ideologue that is genuine. He
has ardently defended the right of free speech for anti-Semitic,
Holocaust-denying cranks like Robert Faurisson and Pierre Guillaume but
chose not to say anything, or sign any petitions, supporting Soviet
intellectuals relegated to the gulag due to their ideas.

 Chomsky's self-proclaimed political orientation is preposterous. He is
enthralled with the socialist ideal but describes himself as a libertarian.
If this were true he would be the first libertarian in history who hated
capitalism and the free market. He also claims to be an anarchist but seems
to love nothing more than strong governments which redistribute the wealth
of its citizens and coerce its people into complying with the socialist
ideal. He is so deeply repulsed by our nation, and so entirely lacking in
perspective, that he holds Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Truman to be war
criminals but Pol Pot, who murdered 25 percent of all Cambodians, as
creating "constructive achievements for much of the population." He has an
easy answer for those who dare argue with him. We do not understand as we
have false consciousness . Only he, the magician, can know the true
workings of the American state.

 Stylistically, Chomsky's works are written with an obfuscating hand and
penned in the language of the opaque. The mechanics of his style: "As a
strategy for creating a Potemkin village of intellectual authenticity,
[are] brilliant; as scholarship it is charlatanism." Chomsky litters his
work with footnotes yet the footnotes are a parlor game because they often
lead to more footnotes citing other assertions he made in earlier works.

 The most egregious passage of them all occurs in John Williamson's essay,
"Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me." It concerns Chomsky's interview
with The New Yorker magazine where he is quoted as saying to one of his
classes that Russian archives proved that Britain and the United States
supported Nazi armies in the hopes of holding back the Soviet's eastern
advance. When questioned about the quotation by Williamson, Chomsky
dismissed the reporter as having manufactured his statement and that she
had printed "a ridiculous gossip column." He then, even though he claimed
not to have said what he did, referred Williamson to a source that did not
support his assertion in the least. Chomsky's statement about the reporter
turned out to be slanderous as the lecture that the reporter quoted from is
available online via videotape. In it, the linguist says exactly what the
reporter says he did. When confronted with his mendacity, Chomsky changed
tactics and pronounced how absurd it was for someone to quote from his
lecture. The real absurdity is that anyone should take him seriously at all.

 In case one thinks that this was an isolated incident, Chomsky appears to
have learned nothing from The New Yorker scandal as he lied last month in a
speech at the University of Michigan when he said that the United States
had planned an attack on Japan before Pearl Harbor. No evidence was offered
to support his claim as no evidence exists.

 What can one say about Chomsky? As a scholar and shaper of young minds he
is deplorable. He is a Jew hating Jew who views the Israelis as Nazis and
their behavior will result in "a final solution from which few will
escape." His country has made him rich and famous although he discerns no
good in the sea of prosperity around him. His is a most disturbed, jealous,
and depressed mind. Chomsky has tied his life's disappointments to
officials in Washington. If the linguist would merely be content to hate
himself rather than project his feelings upon the government, we would all
be much better off.

 Phrase from "Chomsky and the Cold War" by Thomas M. Nichols, p. 48.

 Nichols, p.61.

 Argument made by Eli Lehrer in "Chomsky and the Media: A Kept Press and a
Manipulated People." p.82

 Recounted by John Williamson in "Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me."
pp. 236-241

 Chomsky quoted on page 94 of Paul Bogdanor's "Chomsky's War Against Israel."

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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