Noam Chomsky…
…chomps on the news of Bin Laden’s death.
His opinion is about what you’d suspect, including the fact that he is suspicious of claims that Bin Laden is guilty—including Bin Laden’s own claim.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
All I needed to know about Noam Chomsky was his reaction to Pol Pot’s genocide campaign in Cambodia.
After that, I deep-sixed anything he wrote.
It’s so simple for people like him. Nobody’s guilty of anything except for the USA — and we’re guilty of everything. Problem solved. He must be so mystified as to why the rest of us fail to appreciate him.
Chomsky’s long overdue for a pair of cement boots and a little exercise walking on the water of the Charles river.
Just consider him to be the Jimmy Carter of the literary world — failed philosophy, obsolete, marginalized in current society, and screaming for attention because he is acutely aware of that.
Lots of people live in fantasy land. I heard one person on the radio say OBL was murdered. OBL should have been arrested, read his Miranda rights and brought back to NY for trial. In this persons fantasy land the SEALS slap the cuffs on Bin Laden, inform him he is under arrest and then tell he can remain silent etc and then haul him off to jail like he is a common criminal.
Chomsky was a hugely important linguistic theorist. How is it that he could be so brilliant in that area and such a simple-minded loon politically? Maybe because linguistics was uncontaminated by emotion for him? Politics becomes a blotter for the free-floating rage of a lot of academic types, but his is the most extreme case I can think of.
Chomsky is basically, as T says, a fringe loon whose views have occasionally bled into more “mainstream” liberal perspectives, albeit in diluted form. He seems to hit his peaks of influence whenever there’s a) a war America is engaged in, and b) a Republican leading it. B) does not hold here, so it’s mainly Europeans such as Ken Livingstone or that crazy judge Uthmann in Germany who will be listening intently to this latest piece of insanity.
A few decades ago Chomsky’s buddy Howard Zinn got into a tiff with Sidney Hook, and got utterly eviscerated. I’ve read few debates where one side was so comprehensively destroyed, and consequently this one always held a special place in my memory bank. I googled to see if the exchange was on the internet, and lo and behold, here it is:
http://www.ditext.com/hook/zinn-hook.html
Few people had the art of the philosophical polemic as down pat as Hook, and it’s nice to have occasion to recall just how good he was.
Chomsky-Zinn – thanks for the memories!
There is a joke in Russia: All logicians can be classified into 3 categories: fools, loonies and Novikov.
Who is Novikov? See http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Novikov_Sergi.html
To paraphrase “Apocalypse Now”: It’s clear he has gone completely insane!
Chomsky “theory” is not a theory at all, but a metaphysical philosophy which can not be verified in principle. He postulated the existence of “deep structures” in human conscience that are universal and are depositary of meaning which every linguistic expression denotes. The is no way to know if this is true, but it is very fashionable to believe for those who want to see all humans as basically the same (one of principles of liberal worldview). Actually, this is a value judgement, also central to Judeo-Christian moral, but liberals want it to be a scientific fact (which it is not). That is the only reason for his fame. As a logical or linguistical “theory”, this is a complete nonsense.
It is not that Chomsky got loonish. It is that he set out to use critical linguistics and false consciousness in the service of the Left, also known as serving evil.
He understands words and how to manipulate them. The Left understands words and how to manipulate them. An orator and rhetorical speaker understands those as well.
But not all chose to use it for evil goals.
Somehow it’s appropriate for a theoretician on linguistics to carry the torch of undermining Western civilization. The Marxists’ tool in that goal has not been primarily violence, which would have failed in the U.S.-backed West, but cultural subversion, most prominently in the form of perverting language.
“War is not the answer!” So how does this square with supporting Islamic suicide-murderers? “That’s not war, that’s resistance.”
“Colonialism is evil.” So how about condemning the Muslims’ colonization of Europe? “That’s immigration, you racist!”
“Ethnic exclusivism must be stamped out.” So were you up in the arms when Seri Nusseibeh said a future “Palestinian” state would not admit any Jews in its midst? “It’s an indigenous right to be free of settlers.” (“What about the indigenous of Europe?” See previous point.)
And overarching them all, “Racism is the greatest evil of our age.” So did Brazilian leader Da Silva commit the greatest crime of age when he said the world’s economy was held in thrall to “blond, blue-eyed people”? “That’s just the truth, and anyway, non-whites have the right to rail against their colonial oppressors.”
The Gramscian way is the way of war by means of linguistic definition; whereby the deck is cognitively stacked against all opposition by framing that opposition as the embodiment of evil, and the converse as all good. Couple that tactic with their stranglehold over education and the media, and you can see how a nation can be pulled down from the lofty heights of the Reagan years to the bleak and desolate depths of a Marxist presidency, administration and economic policies all calculated to bring the entire populace to serfdom.
Ideas matter. Words matter. Language matters. To dismiss them all in a Stalinesque “How many legions does the Pope have?” (ironic, considering the same person said, “We don’t let our enemies have our weapons, so why should we let them have our ideas?”) is to open oneself to downfall.
Ziontruth,
I think your comment is quite perceptive. IMO I also point out as in your examples that the left constantly redefines the problem to suit itself. Palestinian national purity is a cultural problem, but Eurpoean national purity is a racist problem. That’s how they make it difficult to argue with them, they constantly change the topic tosuit their argument like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad.
The best way to understand and rhetorically defeat them is to recognize that, at their core, they are anti-capitalists and therefore anti-Western (culture). Proceed from that root and all of their arguments become vulnerable.
I think Chomsky needs a vacation from theory and a healthy dose of reality. Like watching the video released shortly after 9/11 of Bin Laden and his cohorts sitting around in a circle chortling and cackling and patting themselves on the back because their plan – on 9/11 — had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They could barely wait to take credit.
Mr. Chomsky, apparently, either missed this unforgettable followup to the 3,000 MURDERS (which would have been many more if Bin Laden and his pals could have wished it so, or chooses to selective memory that correlates with his sacred theories.
The fact is, this was an attack on our entire country — and we were all victims. Some more accutely than others having lost close friends and family members — but that doesn’t change the reality: America and everyone in it was attacked.
But Chomsky is not alone. The Liberals have been all too eager — and are moreso now than ever before — to characterize 9/11 as a one-time stand-alone fluke. And now, we should all “move on.”
It is just unfathomable for me to comprehend the deliberate ignorance of these people and their absolute belief in a “truth” that does not exist in today’s world.
He is more than simply a loon — he is a loathsome loon.
Noam Chomsky = Howard Zinn.
Eventually we’ll find out about his Party card too.
“Noam Chomsky = Howard Zinn.”
I no longer try to understand what goes in the minds of people like Chomsky and Zinn. I’ve heard both of them speak and came away both times wanting all of my memory of the experience(s) permanently erased. If they are the ‘intelligentsia’ I wish to remain the peasant I was born. Parachute both of them into Taliban held territory and I’ll gleefully watch the beheadings on youtube.
Wow ZionTruth, I have half a mind to copy paste your comment at 3:54 Pm into a note on my facebook page, crediting you of course, with a link back to this article…
I’m surprised to see so many people here characterizing Chomsky as a ln or living in fantasy land. Watching his videos, anyone can plainly see he’s highly rational & always gives evidence for his claims or beliefs. Talk is cheap. To sit here & say such idiotic things about someone as intelligent as Chomsky is just nonsensical. Clearly, the people who post here are slavishly devoted to deluding themselves as much as possible, and then saying negative things about a person who has always been a very sweet guy with admirable moral quality. All the posts here bashing Chomsky are just silly, nonsensical rants not backed up by facts – because they don’t exist. You can criticize people & u should, if you have a good reason to do so and it’s based on something rational. All I see here are insults meant to make someone look stupid, and he’s hardly stupid. It’s amazing to me how different people are and can be – it’s just sad most people nowadays want to attack others instead of discussing things.
Sorry. MCH-
You lost me at this: “Clearly, the people who post here are slavishly devoted to deluding themselves as much as possible…”
Ah, I see a true believer has flitted in and is hanging upside down from our branch.
Chomsky is an apologist for evil.
MCH –
Are u just reading the comments and doing just what you criticize us of doing — trying “to make [us] look stupid” because you disagree? Or did you read neo’s post and the referenced article by Chomsky before denigrating all who post here?
Chomsky begins his article by describing his own “truth” about what happened in Pakistan, and then proceeds to attack the US for all actions it takes.
Only problem is — he wasn’t there, and the information about what took place in Pakistan is still evolving as the White House continues to decide how much information should and will be released, and then backpeddling or issuing “corrections” since Bin Laden was killed. (Note: I have no problem with the White House releasing only certain information for security’s sake — but then, for some reason I have a feeling that you would much prefer that Julian Assange had a video of the entire action, as well as all the info recovered from Bin Laden’s computers to post on his sacred Wikileaks.
Chomsky may very well be a “sweet man” in personality, but he is criticized for his pronunciations based on his liberal ideology instead of facts. He is entitled to have an opinion — as are you — and as is each of us.
Most of us simply believe Chomsky is the delusional one far removed from reality, and his primary purpose is to delude others with his own created truth conveniently designed to support his ideology instead of facts.
Chomsky is proof that intelligence and wisdom have no connection in the human brain.
There are smart fools (Chomsky is ample proof of that), and “ignorant” wise men.
See above, MCH — as with most liberals, you confuse wisdom with intellect. They are utterly unrelated to one another, have no particular requirement to occur in the same brain.
Intellect is the ability to absorb information from books.
Wisdom is the capacity to learn from experience about what works and does not work in the real world, or, even better, to observe the experience of others and generalize from that:
– Bismarck –
When you can see all the vast array of failures of communism and socialism when placed into practice, yet still defend it as a “workable system”, you demonstrate an innate inability to learn from experience.
You might notice that Chomsky defends communism and socialism — he describes himself as “an anarcho-syndicalist” and says he is strongly critical of “authoritarian” Marxist-Leninist-Maoist branches of socialism.
One smaaaaaaal widdle pwoblem…
THERE ARE NO OTHER KINDS.
.
All communism/socialism is inherently totalitarian.
.
It takes — by force — from the individual for the “needs of the state”. That’s totalitarian by nature. There’s no other way to do it.
But despite all the vast array of experiences open to anyone studying the subject, he still imagines that there’s some other way — because he wants to believe in it and it doesn’t matter how it results — virtually always — in oppression and poverty: “It just hasn’t been donnnne right!!”
There’s only ONE way to do communism/socialism RIGHT: Not at all.
Q.E.D. — Chomsky is brilliant, and a fool.
The most appaling is Chomsky’s apology of Pol Pot genocide. Such perversion of morality makes him moraly insane.
As I’ve said before and discovered during the Viet Nam era, liberals’ outrage over dead peasants is directly and completely governed by who did it. It’s a 1-1 correlation. Thus Chomsky and a bazillion others wrt Cambodia.
Their fall back position, as I discovered questioning some of them, was to insist they’d been out of town that week and didn’t know anything about it.
jon baker,
Be my guest. 🙂
Richard Aubrey,
On the DailyKKKos Israel/”Palestine” threads, a common reply to the objection that countries with a far worse human rights record than Israel don’t get half the attention on DKos is, “Israel’s different because they’re doing it with U.S.-made weapons.” Implied here is that if Israel did it with, say, French-made weapons (as was indeed the case in Israel’s first two decades), it’d be all fine.
In fact, the entire faux-moral outrage of the American Left over “what we’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan” is laid bare when considered against their refrain of “Our actions are making them hate us and breeding more terrorists.” It’s not about morality, then, but about fear of enemy retaliation.
That is, of course, a legitimate and rational fear. But the Leftist cloak it in the dishonest language of moralization.
jon baker
I disagree. I don’t think the left fears blowback. They always figure they’ll be away from the fighting, that the bad guys will see whose side they–the left–are really on.
IMO, the left wants us to fear blowback, in order to get us to quit defending ourselves.
You’ll note that there is no possibility of blowback from the local population against terrs who bomb a market. Nope. No problem. There are two possibilities here. One is that the left is messing with the entire concept of blowback, not conceding that it can go two ways, thus being deceitful. The other is that they’re right; that Muslims don’t really hold a grudge when they’re blown up by coreligionists.
At this point, I don’t really know. Dealing with rational thought processes doesn’t seem to get us very far.
MCH, I thought you were serving us some parody
then saying negative things about a person who has always been a very sweet guy with admirable moral quality
Kinda like Osama, then?
To sit here & say such idiotic things about someone as intelligent as Chomsky is just nonsensical
Intelligence cannot be characterized by a scalar, but only by a tensor.
David Horowitz has a lot to say about Chompsky. Here’s a sample, blistering in its intensity. Written 9-26-2001.
The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky
“WITHOUT QUESTION, the most devious, the most dishonest and — in this hour of his nation’s grave crisis — the most treacherous intellect in America belongs to MIT professor Noam Chomsky. On the 150 campuses that have mounted “teach-ins” and rallies [on Sept. 20, 2001] … wherever young people manifest an otherwise incomprehensible rage against their country, the inspirer of their loathing and the instructor of their hate is most likely this man.
There are many who ask how it is possible that our most privileged and educated youth should come to despise their own nation — a free, open, democratic society — and to do so with such ferocious passion. They ask how it is possible for American youth to even consider lending comfort and aid to the Osama bin Ladens and the Saddam Husseins (and the Communists before them). A full answer would involve a search of the deep structures of the human psyche, and its irrepressible longings for a redemptive illusion. But the short answer is to be found in the speeches and writings of an embittered academic and his intellectual supporters.
For 40 years, Noam Chomsky has turned out book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet and speech after speech with one message, and one message alone: America is the Great Satan; it is the fount of evil in the world. In Chomsky’s demented universe, America is responsible not only for its own bad deeds, but for the bad deeds of others, including those of the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In this attitude he is the medium for all those who now search the ruins of Manhattan, not for the victims and the American dead, but for the “root causes” of the catastrophe that befell them.
One little pamphlet of Chomsky’s — “What Uncle Sam Really Wants” — has already sold 160,000 copies (1), but this represents only the tip of the Chomsky iceberg. His venomous message is spread on tapes and CDs, and the campus lecture circuit; he is promoted at rock concerts by superstar bands such as Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and U-2 (whose lead singer Bono called Chomsky a “rebel without a pause”). He is the icon of Hollywood stars like Matt Damon whose genius character in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting is made to invoke Chomsky as the go-to authority for political insight.
… In fact, Chomsky’s influence is best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader of a secular religious cult — as the ayatollah of anti-American hate. …
In his first statement on the terrorist attack, Chomsky’s response to Osama bin Laden’s calculated strike on a building containing 50,000 innocent human beings was to eclipse it with an even greater atrocity he was confident he could attribute to former president Bill Clinton.
Chomsky’s infamous September 12 statement “On the Bombings” began:
“The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may 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 killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it).”(4)
Observe the syntax. The opening reference to the actual attacks is clipped and bloodless, a kind of rhetorical throat clearing for Chomsky to get out of the way, so that he can announce the real subject of his concern — America’s crimes. The accusation against Clinton is even slipped into the text, weasel fashion, as though it were a modifier, when it is actually the substantive message itself.
It is a message that says: Look away, America, from the injury that has been done to you, and contemplate the injuries you have done to them. It is in this sleight of hand that Chomsky reveals his true gift, which is to make the victim, America, appear as an even more heinous perpetrator than the criminal himself. “However bad this may seem, you have done worse.”
In point of fact — and just for the record — however ill-conceived Bill Clinton’s decision to launch a missile into the Sudan, it was not remotely comparable to the World Trade Center massacre. It was, in its very design, precisely the opposite — a defensive response that attempted to minimize casualties. … Chomsky’s use of this incident to diminish the monstrosity of the terrorist attack is a typical Chomsky maneuver, an accurate measure of his instinctive mendacity, and an index of the anti-American dementia which infuses everything he writes and says.
This same psychotic hatred shapes the “historical” perspective he offered to his disciples in an interview conducted a few days after the World Trade Center bombing. It was intended to present America as the devil incarnate — and therefore a worthy target of attack for the guerilla forces of “social justice” all over the world.”
This link leads to several Horowitz essays on Frontpage Magazine online, on Chompsky. Really an eye-opener if you think Noam is just an eccentric moonbat. Horowitz makes the case that he’s an active and knowing agent of evil, a viper we have nursed at our bosom.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/3gvqxew
Money quote:
“Chomsky’s influence is best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader of a secular religious cult — as the ayatollah of anti-American hate.”
Horowitz has been gunning for that old sinner for years; his chosen field of battle is The Academy, and he sees the Ayatollah of MIT as the chief priest of the Haters. Chompsky, btw, lives Very Well in the bosom of the country the treasonous POS despises. Like most home-grown enemies of our country, he’s fattened himself and his bank account with the profits from his venomous hatred.
I just had to add that when I read MCH’s mindf**k of a statement that the Ayatollah of MIT is “a very sweet guy” with an “admirable moral quality,” I was sure s/he was having us on.
Come to think of it, I still am. No one can be that delusional and keep breathing.
MCH is a ‘soft’ provocateur. Alas, poor MCH, we no longer wear flowers in our hair, it went out of fashion decades ago.
“… it’s just sad most people nowadays want to attack others instead of discussing things.. ”
You may cry a river and please do, but no one here will cry one over you.
Beverly, what’s up w/that link you embedded?
“I think Chomsky needs a vacation”
A permanent vacation:
My Boyfriend’s Back
I just found this blog. I like it. G-d bless you! I was a liberal too. Theater does that to a girl. It’s a blessing to see life from different angles– I believe.
Chomsky is not even a useful idiot. He’s a hideous excuse of a human existence. What’s known as a greedy capitalist pig, except modulate the terminology to the non-communist mold. Wiping him out would add .5% to the progress indicator of humanity even.
People think their eugenics obsession with intelligence and good blood somehow makes them superior to all the working peasants and farmers in the world, but it just isn’t so. Intelligence, and Harvard degrees, don’t make you superior to anyone. In fact, such crutches make you more of a slavish slave devoted to the plantation Master than was ever the case for black slaves in America. The shackles that bound plantation slaves were mostly physical, not mental, in nature. Once a person makes a shackle out of their own thoughts, they cannot be freed.
Smart does not equal good. In point of fact, people utilizing the intelligence they were born with to serve the cause of evil, such as Chommie and Lins, are worse then the dumbest people on the Earth.
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Courtesy of Maggie’s Farm.
Noam Chomsky, Osama Bin Laden’s Fellow Traveler
Noam has the Bin Laden seal of approval. Need we know more?